(pristinum). He does not conceal the difficulty he experienced in obtaining even a fair hearing for his doctrine. Christians at large were impatient of everything that seemed to their uninstructed minds to imperil their hard-won monotheism. The majority of believers he tells us are ever of the simple, not to say the unwise and untaught ( simplices, ne dixerim imprudentes et idiotæ); and they were nothing less than terrified (expavescunt) by the mention of an “economy” within the being of God by virtue of which the one only God may be supposed to present distinctions within His unity. They continuously cast in the teeth of those who inculcated such doctrines the charge of preaching two or three gods, while they arrogated to themselves alone the worship of the one only true God.
If we are to take this literally, it will mean that Christians at large in Tertullian’s day—that is, at the time when he wrote this tract—were suspicious of the doctrine of the Trinity and looked upon it almost as a refined polytheism; that they were inclined rather strongly to some form of Monarchianism as alone comporting with a real monotheism. There are not lacking other indications that something like this may have been the case. Hippolytus, in approaching in the course of his great work On Heresies the treatment of the Monarchianism of his day, betrays an even more poignant sense of isolation than Tertullian. He speaks of the promoters of the Monarchian views as bringing great confusion upon believers throughout the whole world.[1] In Rome at least, he tells us, they met with wide consent;[2] and he represents himself as almost single-handed in his opposition to their heresy. In effect it seems to be quite true that through no less than four episcopates—those of Eleutherus, Victor, Zephyrinus and Callistus—the modalistic theology was dominant and occupied the place indeed of the official faith at Rome. We may neglect here hints in Origen[3] that something of the same state of affairs may have obtained in the Eastern churches also. Enough that it is clear that at the time when Tertullian’s tract was written—say during the second decade of the third century[4]—the common sentiment of the West was not untouched by modalistic tendencies.
It must not be supposed that the mass of the Christian
- ↑ Philosophumena, IX, 1: μἐγιστον τάραχον κατά πάντα τὸν κὁσμον ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς πιστοῖς ἐμβάλλοντες.
- ↑ Do., IX, 6.
- ↑ See Harnack, Hist. of Dogma, III, 53, note 2; Dorner, Person of Christ, I, ii, 3.
- ↑ Harnack (Chronologie, II, 285-6, 296) sets the date of the book at c. 213-218.
