Monarchianism, Origen, and the Unsettled Vocabulary

The third century produced the two great failed solutions — modalism, which saved the unity by dissolving the three, and adoptionism, which saved it by demoting the Son — and one enormously fruitful and enormously dangerous attempt at a real answer, Origen’s. This file reports all three accurately and at their strongest, and closes with the fact that made the fourth century inevitable: by 300 the Church had no agreed meaning for the word on which everything would turn.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Problem the Monarchians Were Solving

“Monarchianism” is a modern collective label for a set of third-century positions united by a single concern: to preserve the monarchia, the sole rule and sole principle of the one God, against what looked like the introduction of a second God alongside him. The concern was legitimate. It is the concern of Deuteronomy 6:4 and of the first commandment, and the writers who felt it were not eccentrics — Tertullian complains that at Rome “the simple, the ignorant, and unlearned, who are always the majority of believers,” were on Praxeas’ side and were alarmed by talk of three (Tertullian, Against Praxeas 3; trans. ANF 3). The Church condemned the solutions. She never repudiated the anxiety, and it is worth remembering that both parties in every Trinitarian controversy were defending monotheism.

Two kinds of solution were offered.

Dynamic Monarchianism (Adoptionism)

The first held that Jesus was a man upon whom the power (dynamis) of God came, so that he was Son of God by grace and adoption rather than by nature. The Word or Spirit of God is God’s own impersonal power, not a distinct one who could be a second object of worship.

The earliest named exponent is Theodotus the Cobbler, who came from Byzantium to Rome and was excommunicated by Pope Victor around 190 (reported in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.28, quoting the anonymous Little Labyrinth). The most consequential is Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch and a considerable civil official under Zenobia of Palmyra, deposed by a series of Antiochene synods concluding around 268. Paul is said to have taught that the Logos and Wisdom in God are not a distinct subsistent one but God’s own reason, that this Word dwelt in the man Jesus “as in a temple,” and that Jesus was united to God by a unity of will and love rather than of being. He is also said to have forbidden hymns addressed to Christ.

Everything about Paul has to be stated at one remove, because his own writings are lost and the sources are the synodal letter preserved by Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History VII.27–30) and later fragments of contested reliability (see Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988, on the Antiochene material). What is beyond doubt is the one fact that matters for the next century: the synod that deposed Paul rejected the word homoousios, apparently because Paul had used it — or had exploited it — to mean that Father and Son are one and the same subject with no real distinction. St. Athanasius and St. Basil both have to explain this away at length two generations later (Athanasius, De synodis 43–45; Basil, Epistle 52; trans. NPNF II/4 and II/8). It is the single most important reason why Nicaea’s chosen word was suspect to bishops who were not Arians at all.

Modalist Monarchianism (Sabellianism)

The second solution held that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three names, roles, or successive modes of one and the same divine person: the one God is Father in creation and legislation, Son in redemption, Spirit in sanctification. The associated names are Noetus of Smyrna, Praxeas at Rome, and above all Sabellius, a Libyan teaching at Rome in the 210s or 220s, whose name became the standard label for the whole position.

Tertullian’s summary of his opponent’s slogan is the most vivid statement of the difficulty: Praxeas “put to flight the Paraclete and crucified the Father” (Against Praxeas 1) — the taunt of patripassianism, that if the Son is only the Father under another name, then it is the Father who suffered on the Cross. St. Hippolytus makes the same charge against Noetus (Contra Noetum 1–3; trans. ANF 5).

Sabellianism was and remained the standing accusation against anyone who pressed the unity too hard. That is the crucial point for what follows: for the next two centuries, every proposal about the Trinity had to survive two charges from opposite directions, tritheism on one side and Sabellianism on the other, and a formula that answered one usually invited the other. The Cappadocian achievement is best understood as finding, at last, a way to answer both at once.

Modalism is not a dead option. It is the default misunderstanding of the doctrine among catechumens and, in the form of the water/ice/steam analogy, is taught innocently in parishes to this day.

The Two Dionysii

Around 260 the difficulty produced a diplomatic incident that shows exactly where the tradition stood. Dionysius of Alexandria, arguing against Sabellians in the Pentapolis, pressed the distinction of the Son from the Father so hard that he was reported to Rome for saying the Son is a creature (poiēma) and “foreign in essence” to the Father, and for refusing the word homoousios. Dionysius of Rome replied with a letter defending the unity and condemning those who “divide the monarchy into three separate subsistences and three deities.” The Alexandrian then wrote a Refutation and Defence, explaining that he had been arguing against a particular error, that he had used inadequate illustrations, and that he did accept the substance of the charge’s opposite (Athanasius, De sententia Dionysii, and De decretis 25–26; trans. NPNF II/4).

Nothing better illustrates the state of the vocabulary. Two orthodox bishops, sixty-five years before Nicaea, could not tell whether they agreed, and the word that would later be the test of orthodoxy was at that moment a liability in Alexandria and a demand in Rome.

Origen

Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254) is the third century’s most powerful mind and its most difficult legacy, and any account of Trinitarian theology that omits him is falsified.

His achievements on this subject are three, and each is permanent. First, and decisively, he affirmed the eternal generation of the Son: the Father did not become Father, and there was no moment at which the Son was not. “There never was a time when he was not,” Origen writes, and elsewhere formulates it as a continuous act — the Father does not beget the Son once but “is always begetting him” (Origen, On First Principles I.2.2–4, 9; IV.4.1; Homilies on Jeremiah 9.4; trans. G. W. Butterworth, London: SPCK, 1936). This is precisely the proposition Arius would deny, and it was in place seventy years before him.

Second, he insisted that the Son is a distinct subsistent — a hypostasis — and not a mode or an attribute, against the modalists. Third, he supplied the vocabulary of image and radiance from Hebrews 1:3 and Wisdom 7:26 by which the Nicene party would explain how a generation can be eternal and immaterial.

The dangers are equally real. Origen calls the Son a “second God” (deuteros theos, Against Celsus V.39) and distinguishes ho theos (the God, the Father) from theos used of the Son (Commentary on John II.2). He arranges the three in a hierarchy of the scope of their activity — the Father’s power extends to all beings, the Son’s to rational beings, the Spirit’s to the sanctified (On First Principles I.3.5–8). And he teaches that prayer in the strict sense is to be offered to the Father alone, through the Son (On Prayer 15). Arius’ party quoted him; so did Athanasius. The judgment that the Fathers themselves reached — that Origen supplied indispensable material and formulations that could not be kept — is the correct one.

The condemnations require care. The Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) met in the context of a violent controversy among Palestinian monks over an Origenist system — pre-existence of souls, a primordial unity of rational beings, universal restoration into that unity — much of which is the sixth-century development of Origen’s speculations rather than Origen’s own settled teaching. The anathemas against the Origenists, and the presence of Origen’s name in the council’s anathematizations, have a complicated textual history that this collection does not attempt to resolve (see Constantinople II: The Three Chapters; Apokatastasis in Gregory). What is relevant here is narrower and not in doubt: the eternal generation of the Son, which Origen was the first to state clearly, was received by the Church and is dogma.

The State of the Question in 300

By the turn of the fourth century the Church stood in the following position.

She baptized into three names and worshipped the Son. She had condemned both monarchian solutions. She possessed a Greek theological vocabulary in which ousia, hypostasis, and physis were near-synonyms, all of them capable of meaning “real being,” so that “three hypostases” could be heard as “three beings” and “one hypostasis” as Sabellianism. She had a Latin vocabulary — substantia, persona — which drew the line in a different place, so that the two halves of the Church could not readily check each other’s meaning. And her most recent authoritative act touching the crucial word, the deposition of Paul of Samosata, had gone against homoousios.

The materials for the Arian crisis were therefore all present before Arius. What he supplied was a clear, consistent, and confidently argued position which made the ambiguity intolerable.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. De synodis 43–45; De decretis 25–26; De sententia Dionysii. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
Basil the Great. Epistle 52. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History V.28; VII.27–30. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
Hippolytus. Against the Heresy of One Noetus. Trans. ANF, vol. 5.
Origen. On First Principles I.2–3; IV.4. Trans. G. W. Butterworth. London: SPCK, 1936; repr. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2013.
Origen. Against Celsus V.39; Commentary on John II; On Prayer 15. Trans. ANF, vol. 4, and Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, trans. Rowan A. Greer, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.
Tertullian. Against Praxeas 1, 3. Trans. ANF, vol. 3.
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A. & C. Black, 1977.