which Tertullian is opposing in his tract.[1] The evidence of this is pervasive. It will doubtless be enough to adduce the manifest agreement of his opponents with the Callistan formula in the two chief points to which we have adverted. Tertullian’s opponents, it appears, while allowing to the Word a sort of existence, would not admit Him to be a really substantiva res, “so that He could be regarded as a res et persona” and, being constituted as a second to God the Father, make with the Father “two, Father and Son, God and the Word.”[2] They “sought to interpret the distinction between Father and Son conformably to their own notion, so as to distinguish between them within a single person, saying that the Son is the flesh, that is, the man, that is Jesus, but the Father the Spirit, that is God, that is Christ.”[3] Similarly Tertullian’s opponents seeking to avoid the charge that they blasphemed the Father by making him suffer, granted that the Father and Son were so far two that it was the Son that suffered while the Father only suffered with Him.[4]
The special interest of this for us at the moment lies in a corollary which flows from it. Tertullian was not breaking out a new path in his controversy with the Monarchians. He was entering at the eleventh hour into an old controversy, which had dragged along for a generation, and was now only become more acute and more charged with danger to the Church. This, to be sure, is already implied in his reference to an earlier refutation of Praxeas, and in his representation of the error at present occupying him as merely a repristination of that old heretic’s teaching. Accordingly, not only is the controversy old, but it is old to Tertullian. The general fact is evident on every page of his tract. It is quite clear that Tertullian is not here forging new weapons to meet novel attacks. On both sides much acuteness had already been expended in assault and defense,[5] and the lines of reasoning had already long been laid down and even the proofs pro and con repeatedly urged. The very exegetical arguments bear on them the stamp of long use and betray the existence on both sides of a kind of exegetical tradition already formed. The emergence of this fact throws us into doubt as to how much even of what seems new and original in the tract may not likewise be part of the hereditary property of the controversy.
- ↑ Cf. Rolffs in the Texte und Untersuch., XII, iv, 94 sq.
- ↑ Adv. Prax., C. vii.
- ↑ C. xxvii.
- ↑ C. xxix. Filius patitur, pater vero compatitur. Compassus est pater filio.
- ↑ We are here drawing upon Lipsius’ admirable article, “On Tertullian’s Tract Against Praxeas,” published in the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologic, XIII (1868), pp. 701–724. For the present matter see especially p. 710.
