outset, is not an extended treatise. It is a brief document filling but some fifty pages. Nor is it a calm constructive work in which the author sets himself to develop in its completeness a doctrinal elaboration. It is a vigorous and lively polemic designed to meet an immediate crisis. In other words, it is distinctly an occasional writing, devoted to the refutation of a heresy which was at the moment troubling the churches. Any doctrinal construction which may be found in it is accordingly purely incidental, and rather betrays the underlying conceptions of the writer’s mind than forms the calculated burden of the document. If this constructive element, thus emerging, is nevertheless epoch-making for the history of thought, it will redound with peculiar force to the honor of the author. That it so emerges, however, renders it necessary that, for the proper estimate of the tract, we should begin by obtaining a somewhat exact understanding of the circumstances which gave birth to it.
We must not be misled by its title or by the reversion of the discourse now and then to the form of direct address into supposing the tract a personal assault upon Praxeas himself. It is quite clear that Praxeas was a figure resurrected by Tertullian from a comparatively remote past, and given prominence in the discussion, perhaps, as a sort of controversial device. Tertullian, apparently, would represent the teachings he is opposing as a mere recrudescence of an exploded notion, discredited in its vacillating and weak propounder a generation ago.[1] Of Praxeas himself we know nothing except what Tertullian tells us: there is no independent mention of his name in the entirety of Christian literature. He is represented as an Asian confessor who was the first to import into Rome the type of doctrine which Tertullian calls Monarchianism or Patripassianism.[2] Evidently he had made himself felt for a time in
- ↑ Even were this motive not operative, it would not follow from the use of Praxeas’ name that he and the book were contemporaneous. Josephus controverted Apion and Origen Celsus only after a considerable interval of years. The same seems to be true of the use of Fronto’s name in the Octavius of Minucius Felix. (See Harnack, Chronologie, IT. 326, and note; and compare what is said by Hagemann, Rom. Kirche, pp. 235-6.)
- ↑ Hagemann’s attempt (Rom. Kirche, 234 and sq.) to identify Praxeas with Callistus is only a part of his general attempt so to manipulate the facts as to make Callistus the real protagonist for fundamental Christian truth and Tertullian the real errorist. In the prosecution of this endeavor he gives to Callistus all that belongs rightfully to Tertullian (and more). He speaks of him as setting forth “the doctrine of the unity of nature of the Father and Son and the doctrine of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ, with a completeness of formal development such as they received later through the instrumentality of the General Councils only after long and bitter controversies,” and as thus more than
