NOVATIAN
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NOVATIAN
ous places and at various times laws were made which
punished certain sins either with the deferring of
Communion till the hour of death, or even with re-
fusal of Communion in the hour of death. Even St.
Cyprian approvetl the hitter course in the ease of those
who refused to do penance and only repi'ntcd on their
death-bed; but this was because .such a repcMitaiic<-
seemed of dovibtful sincerity. But severity in itself
was but cruelty or injustice; there was no heresy un-
til it was denied tliut the Church has the power to
grant absolution in certain cases. This was Nova-
tian's heresy; and St. Cyprian says the Novatians
held no longer the Catholic creed and baptismal inter-
rogation, for when they said " Dost thou believe in the
remission of sins, and everlasting life, through Holy
Church?" they were liars.
^\■HITI^'GS.— St. Jerome mentions a number of writ- ings of Novatian, only two of which have come down to us, the "De Cibis Judaicis" and the "De Trini- tate". The former is a letter written in retirement during a time of persecution, and was preceded by two otlier letters on Circumcision and the Sabbath, which are lost. It interprets the unclean animals as signi- fying (HtTcrent classes of vicious men; and explains that the greater hberty allowed to Christians is not to be a motive for luxury. The book " De Trinitate " is a fine piece of writing. The first eight chapters con- cern the transcendence and greatness of God, who is above all thought and can be described by no name. Novatian goes on to prove the Divinity of the Son at great length, arguing from both the Old and the New Testaments, and adding that it is an insult to the Father to say that a Father who is God cannot beget a Son who is God. But Novatian falls into the error made by so many early writers of separating the Father from the Son, so that he makes the Father address to the Son the command to create, and the Son obeys; he identifies the Son with the angels who appeared in the Old Testament to Agar, Abraham, etc. "It pertains to the person of Christ that He should be God because He is the Son of God, and that He should be an Angel because He announces the Father's Will" {paterna; dis positio?ns annunliator est) . The Son is " the second Person after the Father", less than the Father in that He is originated by the Father; He is the imitator of all His works, and is always obedient to the Father, and is one with Him "by concord, by love, and by afTection".
No wonder such a description should seem to op- ponents to make two Gods; and consequently, after a chapter on the Holy Ghost (.xxix), Novatian returns to the subject in a kind of appendix (xxx-xxxi). Two kinds of heretics, he explains, try to guard the unity of God, the one kind (Sabellians) by identifying the Father with the Son, the other (Ebionites, etc.) by de- nying that the Son is God; thus is Christ again cruci- fied between two thieves, and is reviled by both. Novatian declares that there is indeed but one God, unbegotten, invisible, immense, immortal; the Word (Sermo), His Son, is a substance that proceeds from Him {utibstanlM prolata), whose generation no apostle nor angel nor any creature can declare. He is not a second God, because He is eternally in the Father, else the Fathi r would not be eternally Father. He pro- ceeded from the Father, when the Father willed (this syncalabasis for the purpose of creation is evidently distinguished from the eternal begetting in the Fa- ther), and remained ivilh the Father. If He were also the unbegotten, invisible, incomprehensible, there might indeed be said to be two Gods; but in fact He has from the Father whatever He has, and there is but one origin {origo^principi-um), the Father. "One God is demonstratecf, the true and eternal Father, from whom alone this energy of the Godhead is sent forth, being handed on to the Son, and again by com- munion of substance it is returned to the Father." In this doctrine there is much that is incorrect, yet much
that seems meant to express the consubstantiality of
the Son, or at least His generation out of the substance
of the Father. But it is a very unsatisfactory unity
which is attained, and it seems to be suggested that
the Son is not immense or invisible, but tlu' image of
the Father capable of manifesting Ilim. Ilippolytus
is in the same difficulty, and it a]i])car8 that Novatian
borrowed from him as well as fnun Tertullian and
Justin. It would seem that Tcrlulliaii and Ilijipoly-
tus understood somewhat better than did Novatian
the traditional Roman doctrine of the consubstantial-
ity of the Son, but that all three were led astray by
their acquaintance with the Greek theology, which
interpreted of the Son as God Scriptural exjn-essions
(especially those of St. Paul) which pmjjcrly ajiply to
Him as the God-Man. But at least Novatian lias the
merit of not identifying the Word with the Father, nor
Sonship with the prolation of the Word for the purpose
of Creation, for He plainly teaches the eternal genera-
tion. This is a notable advance on TertuUian.
On the Incarnation Novatian seems to have been orthodox, though he is not explicit. He .speaks cor- rectly of the one Person having two substances, the Godhead and Humanity, in the way that is habitual to the most exact Western theologians. But he very often speaks of "the man" assumed by the Divine Person, so that he has been suspected of Nestorianiz- ing. This is unfair, since he is equally liable to the opposite accusation of making "the man" so far from being a distinct personality that He is merely flesh assumed {caro, or substantia carnis el corporis). But there is no real ground for supposing that Novatian meant to deny an intellectual soul in Christ; he does not think of the point, and is only anxious to assert the reality of our Lord's flesh. The Son of God, he says, joins to Himself the Son of Man, and by this connexion and mingling he makes the Son of Man be- come Son of God, which He was not by nature. This last sentence has been described as Adoptionism. But the Spanish Adoptionists taught that the Human Nature of Christ as joined to the Godhead is the adopted Son of God. Novatian only means that be- fore its assumption it was not by nature the Son of God ; the form of words is bad, but there is not neces- sarily any heresy in the thought. Newman, though he does not make the best of Novatian, says that he "approaches more nearly to doctrinal precision than any of the writers of the East and West" who pre- ceded him (Tracts theological and ecclesiastical, p. 239).
The two pseudo-Cyprianic works, both by one au- thor, "DeSpectaculis" and "De bono pudicitiie", are attributed to Novatian by Weyman, followed by Demmler, Bardenhewer, Harnack, and others. The pseudo-Cyprianic "De laude martyrii" has been as- cribed to Novatian by Harnack, but with less proba- bility. The pseudo-Cyprianic sermon, ' ' Adversus Ju- da'os", is by a close friend or follower of Novatian if not by himself, according to Landgraf, followed by Harnack and Jordan. In 1900 Mgr Batiffol with the help of Dom A. Wilmart published, under the title of "Tractatus Origenis de hbris SS. Scripturarum", twenty sermons which he had discovered in two MSS. at Orleans and St. Omer. Weyman, Haussleiter, and Zahn perceived that these curious homilies on the Old Testament were written in Latin and are not transla- tions from the Greek. They attributed them to No- vatian with so much confidence that a disciple of Zahn's, H. Jordan, has written a book on the theology of Novatian, grounded principally on these sernions. It was, however, pointed out that the theology is of a more developed and later character than that of No- vatian. Funk showed that the mention of competentes (candidates for baptism) implies the fourth century. Dom Morin suggested Gregorius Bsticus of Ilhberis (Elvira), but withdrew this when it seemed clear that the author had used Ciaudentius of Brescia and Rufi-
