It is proposed to subject this stateme~t to such testing as is involved in going to the tract ” Against Praxeas ” and seeking to form a judgment of its value and of the place in the development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity which it vindicates for its author.

The tract “Against Praxeas,” it must be borne in mind from the 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 tl,e 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.8 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.6 Evidently he had made himself felt for a time in Rome, and among other things had succeeded in reversing the favorable policy of the Roman bishops with respect to the Montanists. By this achievement he naturally earned from Tertullian a twofold scorn. Tertullian bitingly remarks that thus Praxeas had doubly done the devil’s business in Rome - ” he had expelled prophecy and brought in heresy, had exiled the Paraclete and crucified the Father.” 7 His heresy passed over into Africa - while the people, says Tertullian, slept in doctrinal simplicity. But God raised up a defender of the truth: and the heresy was exposed and seemingly destroyed; Praxeas himself submitted to correction and returned to the old faith. Apparently this was the end of it all: exinde silentium, says Tertullian, with terse significance. But it is the curse of noxious growths that they are apt to leave seeds behind them. So it happened in this case also. The tares had been rooted up and burned. But lo, after so long a time, the new crop appeared, and the last state was unspeakably worse than the first. The tares had everywhere, says Tertullian, shaken out their seed, and now, after having lain hid so long, their vitality had become only too manifest. It is not then an individual that Tertullian is facing; it is a widespread condition. This tract is not an attempt to silence a heretic menacing the peace of the Church; it is an effort to correct a rampant evil already widely spread in the community, by which the very existence of the truth is endangered.

The tones in which Tertullian speaks of the rise of the heresy in the person of Praxeas and of its prevalence at the time of his writing are noticeably different. Then it was an exotic vagary seeking footing in the West and finding none: now it is a native growth, springing up everywhere. The tares had cast their seed, he says,” everywhere” (ubique). Nor can he look with comfort on the task of rooting them up. Though he is not the man to lose courage, and remiµds himself of the past success, he yet finds his deepest consolation in the assurance that all tares shall be burnt up at the last day. When a man looks forward to the Judgment Day for the vindication of his cause, he is not far from despairing of success here and now. It looks very much as if Tertullian felt himself in a hopeless minority in his defense of what he calls the pristine faith (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 idiotm) ; 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.8 In Rome at least, he tells us, they met with wide consent; 9 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 10 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 11 - the common sentiment of the West was not untouched by Modalistic tendencies.

It must not be supposed that the mass of the Christian population, in the West at least - for it is with the West that we have particularly to do - held to a Modalistic theory as a definitely conceived theological formula. What is rather to be said is that the Modalistic formula when warily presented roused in the minds of most men of the time no very keen sense of opposition, while the Trinitarian formula was apt to offend their monotheistic consciousness. This is by no means surprising; and it is partially paralleled by the situation in the East after the promulgation of the Nicene creed. The difficulty in obtaining assent to that symbol did not turn on the prevalence of definitely Arian sentiments so much as upon the indefiniteness of the conceptions current among the people at large and the consequent difficulty experienced by so definite a formula in making its way among them. Men were startled by these sharp definitions and felt more or less unprepared to make them the expression of their simple and somewhat undefined faith. So here, a century before the Nicene decision, the people in the West found similar difficulty with the Trini-: tarian distinctions. The nai:ve faith of the average Christian crystallized around the two foci of the unity of God and the Deity of Christ: and the Modalistic formulas might easily be made to appear to the untrained mind to provide simply and easily for both items of belief, and so to strike out a safe middle pathway between the Dynamistic Monarchianism of the Theodotuses and Artemodites, on the one hand, and the subtle constructions of Hippolytus and Tertullian on the other. The one extreme was unacceptable because it did not allow for the true deity of the Redeemer: the other seemed suspicious as endangering the true unity of God.

It is not at all strange, therefore, that the unsophisticated Christian should tremble on the verge of accepting Modalistic Monarchianism, especially when presented, in a guarded form, as a simple and safe solution of a vexing problem. It was thus that it was quick to commend itself; and it was on this ground that it was in its most prudent formulation exploited at Rome as the official faith. When it was brought to Rome, we must remember, it was set over against, not developed Trinitarianism, but rather, on the one side, the crude humanitarianism of the Dynamistic school of Monarchianism which was at the moment troubling the Church there, and, on the other, the almost equally crude emanationism of the Logos speculation, which had held the minds of thinking men for a generation. It was therefore naturally treated as a deliverance from opposite heresies, along whose safe middle way men might walk in the light of the twin truths of the deity of Christ and the unity of God. When Hippolytus assailed it, therefore, he obtained no hearing and was treated as merely another disturber of the Church’s peace. His assault did not, indeed, fail of all effect: he rendered it impossible for Modalism to be adopted in its crudest form, and forced modifications in it by which it was given the appearance of more nearly covering the main facts of the revelation of God in the Gospel. But he could by no means turn the thoughts of men into a different channel; neither, indeed, was he capable of digging a channel into which their thoughts might justly flow. The outcome, therefore, was only that Callistus -excommunicated both Sabellius and Hippolytus and set forth as the Christian faith a new doctrine which was intended to declare the central truths of the Gospel as understood by men of moderation and balanced judgment. Hippolytus looked on this new doctrine as itself essentially Modalism,’ with a tendency downward. And Hippolytus was right. But it commended itself powerfully to the age, and that not merely in Rome, but in Africa. It is this refined Modalism of the Roman compromise, which seemed to be threatening to become the Christianity of the West, that Tertullian attacks in his tract “Against Praxeas.”

It is not necessary for our present purpose to trace the gradual modifications which the Monarchian teaching underwent from its earliest form as taught at Rome by Noetus and possibly by Praxeas to its fullest development and most advanced adjustment in the hands of Callistus to the fundamental Church doctrines of God and Christ. Suffice it to say that the modifications by which Callistus sought to” catholicize “Monarchian Modalism, proceeded by according some sort of recognition to the Logos doctrine on the one hand, and on the other by softening the crass assertion that it was the Father who suffered on the cross. Of course no personal distinction between Father and Son, or God and Logos, was admitted. But a nominal distinction was accorded, and this distinction was given quasi-validity by a further distinction of times. “Callistus says,” explains Hippolytus,12 ” that the same Logos is at once Son and Father, distinguished in name, but really one individual Spirit, … and that the Spirit incarnated in the virgin is not different from the Father but one and the same… . For that which is seen, which is of course the man - it is that which is the Son; but the Spirit which is contained in the Son is the Father, since there are not two Gods, Father and Son, but one. Now, the Father being in him” -i.e., the Son, which is the “man II or the ” flesh ” - ” seeing that he had assumed the flesh, deified it by uniting it with Himself, and made it one, so that the Father and Son are called one God, while this person being one cannot be two, and so the Father suffered along with the Son.” Hippolytus adds that Callistus worked out this form of statement because he did not ” wish to say the Father suffered.” The point here, therefore, is that the Son differs from the Father not as the incarnate differs from the unincarnate God, but rather as the incarnating man differs from the incarnated Spirit. As then the flesh is properly designated by the” Son” and it is the flesh that suffers, the Father, who is properly the Spirit incarnated in the “Son,” may more exactly be said to have suffered along with the flesh, i.e., the “Son,” than Himself to have endured the suffering. The suffering was, in other words, in the ” flesh ”: the informing ” Spirit II only partook in the suffering of the “flesh” because joined in personal union with it. The artificiality of this construction is manifest on the face of it; as also is its instability. Hippolytus himself pointed out its evident tendency to fall back into the lower Dynamistic Monarchianism; since in proportion as the Father as the Spirit and the Son as the flesh were separated in thought, the reality of the incarnation was likely to give way in favor of a more or less clearly conceived inhabitation. Thus Jesus would become again only a man in whom God dwelt. The formula of ” the Father suffering with the Son” was really, therefore, a mediation toward humanitarianism rather than toward full recognition of the deity of the Son; and it is interesting to observe in the later Arians the reemergence of the mode of expression thus struck out by Callistus. With them of course it was not a question of the Father but of that ” Middle Being ” which they called the Son of God; but what they affirm of it is that having taken ” man ” from the Virgin Mary, it ” shared in ” the sufferings of this “man ” on the cross.13 The obvious meaning of the Arians will throw light back upon the idea which Callistus meant to convey. This was clearly that the incarnation of the Spirit which was God in the man which was Christ, brought that Spirit into definite relations to the sufferings endured by this man properly in his flesh.

What it concerns us to note here particularly, however, is that it is just this Callistan formula which underlies the Monarchianism which Tertullian is opposing in his tract.u 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.” 15 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.” 16 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.17 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 18 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. Even the technical terms which Tertullian employs with such predilection and which are often thought of as contributions of his own to the discussion, such as olKovoµla., trinitas,1° for example, need not be new, but may owe it only to accident that they come here for the first time strikingly before us. Indeed, Tertullian does not use them as if they were novelties. On the contrary, he introduces them as well-known terms, which he could freely employ as such. He speaks 20 of ” that dispensation which we call the olKovoµla,” that is to say, apparently, “which is commonly so called.” And in the same connection he joins the “distribution of the Unity into a Trinity” 21 with the olKovoµla in such a manner as inevitably to suggest to the reader that this mode of explaining the oLKovoµla belonged to its tradition. Assuredly no reader would derive from the tract the impression that such terms were new coinages struck out to meet the occasion.

Additional point is given to this impression by the circumstance that Tertullian not only puts forward no claim to originality, but actually asserts that his teaching is the traditiona\ teaching of the Church. As over against th_e novel character of the new-fangled teaching of Praxeas, which falls as such under the prescription which Tertullian was wont to bring against all heresies as innovations and therefore no part of the original deposit of the faith, he sets his doctrine as a doctrine which had always been believed and now much more, under the better instruction of the Paraclete. “We, however, as always, so now especially, since better instructed by the Paraclete, who is the leader into all truth, believe that there is one God indeed, but yet under the following dispensation, which we call the olKovoµla.” 22 An attempt has been made, it is true, to read in this statement a hint that the doctrine of the Trinity was a peculiarity of the Montanists; 23 and to make out that Tertullian means to say only that ” we Montanists ” have always so believed. The language, however, will not lend itself to this interpretation. Tertullian does say that since he became a Montanist his belief has been strengthened, and elsewhere (chap.

xiii.) he intimates that the Montanists were especially clear as to the “economy,” as he calls the distinction within the unity of the Godhead. Perhaps he means that special prophetic deliverances expounding the Trinity in unity had among the Montanists been added to the traditionary faith. Perhaps he means only that the emphasis laid by the Montanistic movement, in distinction from the Father and Son, on the activity and personality of the Paraclete as the introducer of a new dispensation, had conduced to clearer views of the distinctions included in the unity of the Godhead. But the very adduction of this clearer or fuller view as consequent upon his defection to Montanism, only throws into prominence the fact that the doctrine itself belonged to his pre-Montanistic period also.

” We as always, so now especially,” contrasts two periods and can only mean that this doctrine dated in his consciousness from a day earlier than his Montanism. We must understand Tertullian then as affirming that the doctrine of the Trinity in unity which he is teaching belongs to the traditionary lore of the Church. His testimony, in this case, is express that what he teaches in this tract is nothing new, but only a part of his original faith.

This testimony is supported by the occurrence in earlier whose “Nucleus Historire Ecclesiasticre” was one of the works which Bull’s “Defensio “was intended to meet. See Bull, “Defensio Fidei Nicaenre,” II. vii. 7 (E. T. 1851, i. p. 203). It was revived vigorously by the Tiibingen School (Baur, ” Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung Gottes,” i. p. 177, and especially Schwegler, e.g., “Nachapostolischer Zeitalter,” ii. p. 341). Lipsius, as quoted, p. 719, opposes the notion, but argues that nevertheless in Africa, at least, there was a connection between Montanism and Trinitarianism. Besides his own paper in the Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Theologie, 1866, p. 194, Lipsius refers for information to Ritschl, “Altkatholische Kirche,” 2d ed. pp. 487 f, and Volckmar, “Hippolyt.,” p. 115. Stier argues the question in his “Die Gottes- und Logos-Lehre Tertullians,” p. 93, note; cf. Dorner, “Doctrine of the Person of Christ,” Div. I. ii. p. 20, and especially p. «8—449.

treatises by Tertullian - notably in his great “Apology ” ~, - of passages in which essential elements of his doctrine are given expression in his characteristic forms. And it is still further supported by the preservation of such a treatise by the hand of another, as Hippolytus’ fragment against Noetus,25 in which· something similar to the same doctrine is enunciated. It has been contended, indeed, that Tertullian borrowed from Hip- , polytus, or that Hippolytus borrowed from Tertullian. And there may be little decisive to urge against either hypothesis if otherwise commended. But in the absence of such further commendation it seems much more probable that the two treatises independently embody a point of view already traditional in the Church.26 In any case Hippolytus must be believed to be stating in essence no other doctrine than that which he had striven for a generation to impress upon the Roman Church; and he makes the same impression that Tertullian does of handling well-worn weapons. Indeed we need bear in mind nothing more than the most obvious New Testament data culminating in the baptismal formula, the ritual use of which kept its contents clearly before the mind of every Christian, and the prevalence attained throughout the Christian world by the Logos speculation of the Apologists, to be assured a priori that it was not left either to Hippolytus or to Tertullian to work out the essential elements of the doctrine of the Trinity in unity. But this compels us to recognize that something more entered into the na:ive faith of the average Christian man as essential constituents of his Christian confession than the two doctrines of the unity of God and the deity of the Redeemer. Even the simple Christian could not avoid forming some conception of the relation of his divine Redeemer to the Father, and in doing so could not content himself with an absolute identification of the two. Nor could he help extending his speculation to embrace some doctrine of the Spirit whom he was bound to recognize as God, and yet as in some way neither the Father nor the Son, along with whom He was named in the formula of baptism. In proportion as the believer was aware of the course of the debate that had gone on in the Church, and was affected by the movements which had agitated it from the beginning - all of which touched more or less directly on these points - he would have been driven along a pathway which, in attempting to avoid the heresies that were tearing the Church, could emerge in nothing else than some doctrine of Trinity in unity. The presence of a Trinitarian tradition in the Church is thus so far from surprising that its absence would be inexplicable. There is no reason, therefore, why we should discredit Tertullian’s testimony that Christians had always believed in essence what he teaches in his tract” Against Praxeas.”

If it is very easy to exaggerate the originality of Tertullian’s doctrine as set forth in this tract, however, it is equally easy to underestimate it. Let us allow that Trinitarianism is inherent in the elements of the Gospel, and that, under the influence of the Logos Christology and in opposition to Gnostic emanationism, a certain crude Trinitarianism must have formed a part of the common faith of na:ive Christendom. It remains none the less true that men were very slow in explicating this inherent doctrine of Christianity, at least with any clearness or concinnity; and meanwhile they were a prey to numerous more or less attractive substitutes for it, among which the Logos Christology long held the field, and its contradictory, Modalistic Monarchianism, as we have seen, at one time bade fair to establish itself as the common doctrine of the churches. And it remains true, moreover, that no one earlier than Tertullian and few besides Tertullian, prior to the outbreak of the Arian controversy, seem to have succeeded in giving anything like a tenable expression to this potential Trinitarianism. If Tertullian may not be accredited with the invention of the doctrine of the Trinity, it may yet be that it was through him that the elements of this doctrine first obtained something like a scientific adjustment, and that he may not unfairly, therefore, be accounted its originator, in a sense somewhat similar to that in which Augustine may be accounted the originator of the doctrines of original sin and sovereign grace, Anselm of the doctrine of satisfaction, and Luther of that of justification by faith. Whether he may be so accounted, and how far, can be determined only by a careful examination of what he has actually set down in his writings. When now we come to scrutinize with the requisite closeness the doctrine which underlies Tertullian’s enunciations in his tract, “Against Praxeas,” we perceive that it is, in point of fact, fundamentally little else than the simple Biblical teaching as to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit elaborated under the categories of the Logos Christology.

This Logos Christology had been simply taken over by Tertullian from the Apologists, who had wrought it fully out and made it dominant in the Christian thought of the time. Its roots were planted alike in Jewish religion and in Gentile speculation. Its point of origin lay in a conception of the transcendence of God which rendered it necessary to mediate his activity ad extra by the assumption of the interposition of intermediate beings. In their highest form, the speculations thus induced gave birth to the idea of the Logos. Under the influence of passages like the eighth chapter of Proverbs and the first chapter of John, the historical Jesus was identified with this Logos, and thus the Logos Christology was, in principle, completed. It will be observed that the Logos Christology was in its very essence cosmological in intention: its reason for existence was to render it possible to conceive the divine works of creation and government consistently with the divine transcendence: it was therefore bound up necessarily with the course of temporal development and involved a process in God. The Logos was in principle God conceived in relation to things of time and space: God, therefore, not as absolute, but as relative. In its very essence, therefore, the Logos conception likewise involved the strongest subordinationism. Its very reason for existence was to provide a divine being who does the will of God in the regions of time and space, into which it were inconceivable that the Invisible God should be able to intrude in His own person. The Logos was therefore necessarily conceived as reduced divinity - divinity, so to speak, at the periphery rather than at the center of its conception. This means, further, that the Logos was inevitably conceived as a protrusion of God, or to speak more explicitly, under the category of emanation. The affinity of the Logos speculation with the emanation theories of the Gnostics is, therefore, close. The distinction between the two does not lie, however, merely in the number of emanations presumed to have proceeded from the fountain-deity, nor merely in the functions ascribed to these emanations, bizarre as the developments of Gnosticism were in this matter. The distinction lies much more in the fundamental conception entertained of the nature of the fountain-deity itself, and more directly in the conception developed of the nature of the emanation process and the relation of the resulting emanations to the primal-deity. The Gnostic ·systems tended ever to look upon the source-deity as a featureless abyss of being, to conceive the process of emanation from it as a blind and necessary evolution, and to attribute to the emanations resulting from this process a high degree of independence of the primal-deity. In direct contradiction to the Gnostic construction, the Logos speculation conceived God as personal, the procession of the Logos as a voluntary act on the part of God, and the Logos itself as, so to say, a function of the eternal God Himself, never escaping from the control of His will, or, as it might be more just to say, from participation in His fullness. The effect of the Gnostic speculation was to create a hierarchy of lesser divinities, stretching from the primal abyss of being downward in ever-widening circles and diminishing potencies to the verge of the material world itself. The value of the Logos speculation to the first age of Christianity was that it enabled Christian thinkers to preserve the unity of God while yet guarding His transcendence; and to look upon the historical Jesus, identified with the Logos, as very God, the Creator and Governor of the world, while yet recognizing His subordination to the will of God and His engagement with the course of development of things in time and space. It is probable that it was only by the help of the Logos speculation that Christianity was able to preserve its fundamental confession in the sharp conflict through which it was called to pass in the second century. By the aid of that speculation, at all events, it emerged from this conflict with a firm and clear hold upon both of the fundamental principles of the unity of the Indivisible God and the deity of the historical Jesus, who was, as John had taught in words, the Logos of God; that is to say, as the leaders of the day interpreted the significance of the term, the pretemporal protrusion of the deity for the purpose of creating the’ world of time and space and the mediating instrument of the deity in all His dealings with the world of time and space. Tertullian, now, was the heir of this whole Logos construction, and he took it over from the Apologists in its entirety, with his accustomed clearness and even intensity of perception.27 There was no element in it which he did not grasp with the most penetrating intuition of its significance and of the possibilities of its development at the call of fresh doctrinal needs. The demand for a new application of it came to him in the rise of the Monarchian controversy, and he opposed the Logos doctrine to the new construction with a confidence and a skill in adaptation which are nothing less than astonishing. This seems the precise account to give of the scope of the tract, ” Against Praxeas.” It is in essence an attempt to adapt the old Logos speculation, which Tertullian had taken over in its entirety from the Apologists, to the new conditions induced by the rise and remarkable success of the Monarchian movement.

Whatever contributions, then, to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity Tertullian was able to make were made because of the emergence of need for such new adjustments of the old Logos speculation, and because he met this need with talents of the first order.

We must not underestimate the significance of the rise and rapid spread of the Monarchian Christology; or imagine that it could have filled the place in the history of the late second and early third centuries which it did, if it had found no justification for itself in the condition of Christian thought at the time, or had brought no contribution for the Christian thought of the.future. The truth is, the Logos speculation left much to be desired in the formulation of the Christian doctrines of God and the Mediator between God and man; and the Monarchian speculation came bearing these very desiderata in its hands. The Logos Christology put itself forward as the guardian alike of the unity of God and of the deity of Jesus. But the unity it ascribed to God was, after all, apt to be but a broken unity, and the deity it ascribed to Jesus was at best but a derived deity. According to it, Jesus was not the God over all that Paul called Him, but the Logos; and the Logos was not one with the Father, as John taught, and indeed as Jesus (who was the Logos) asserted, but an efflux from the Father - by so much lower than the Father as the possibility of entrance into and commerce with the world of space and time implied. Men might very well ask if this construction did justice either to the unity of God or to the deity of Jesus which it essayed to protect; whether every attempt to do justice on its basis to the unity of God would not mean disparagement of the perfect deity of Jesus, and every attempt to do justice to the deity of Jesus would not mean the erection of the Logos, with whom Jesus was identified rather than with God, to a place alongside of God, which would involve the confession of two Gods. By the rise of Monarchianism, in other words, the traditional Logos construction was put sharply on its trial. It was demanded of it that it show itself capable of doing justice to the deity of Jesus, while yet retaining in integrity the unity of God, or else give place to a better scheme which by identifying Jesus directly with the One God, certainly provided fully for these two focal conceptions.

The difficulty of the situation into which the assault of Monarchianism brought the Logos Christology, by its insistence that Jesus should be recognized as all that God is, becomes manifest when we reflect that every attempt to elevate the deity that was in Jesus to absolute equality with the God over all seemed to involve in one way or another the abandonment of the entire Logos speculation. The simple identifica- • tion of Jesus with God would be, of course, the formal abolishment of the Logos speculation altogether. But the attempt to retain the distinction beween God and the Logos, while Jesus as the Logos was made all that God is, seemed only a round-about way to the same goal. Since the postulation of a Logos turned precisely on the assumption that God in Himself is too transcendent to enter into commerce with the world of space and time, the obliteration of the difference between the Logos and God appeared to reduce the whole Logos hypothesis to an absurdity. Either the primal-deity would need no Logos, or the Logos Himself would require another Logos. The task Tertullian found facing him when he undertook the defense of the Logos Christology over against the Monarchian assault was thus one of no little delicacy and difficulty. It was a task of great delicacy. For the Monarchians did not come forward as innovators in doctrine, but as protestants in the interest of the fundamental Christian doctrines of the divine unity and of the Godhead of the Redeemer against destructive speculations which were endangering the purity of the Christian confession. They embodied the protest of the simple believer against philosophic evaporations of the faith. Above all they were giving at last, so they said, his just due to Christ. It means everything when we hear Hippolytus quoting Noetus as exclaiming: ” How can I be doing wrong in glorifying Christ? ” 28 - a cry, we may be sure, which found an echo in every Christian heart. And it was a task of great difficulty. For what Tertullian had to do was to establish the true and complete deity of Jesus, and at the same time the reality of His distinctness as the Logos from the fontal-deity, without creating two Gods. This is, on the face of it, precisely the problem of the Trinity. And so far as Tertullian succeeded in it, he must be recognized as the father of the Church doctrine of the Trinity.

Of course Tertullian was not completely successful in so great a task. On his postulates, indeed, complete success was difficult to the verge of impossibility. The Logos Christology was, to speak shortly, in its fundamental assumptions incompatible with a developed doctrine of immanent Trinity. Its primary object was to provide a mediating being through which the essentially” Invisible” God could become” visible” - the absolute God enter into relations - the transcendent God come into connection with a world of time and space. To it Jesus must by the very necessity of its fundamental postulates be something less than the God over all. So soon as He was allowed to be Himself all that God is, the very reason for existence of the Logos speculation wai!l removed. Nor was it easy on the assumptions of the Logos Christology to allow a real distinctness of person for the Logos. On its postulates the Logos must be itself God - God prolate - God in reduction - God, as we have said, on the periphery of His Being: but God Himself nevertheless. On every attempt to sharpen the distinction by conceiving it as truly personal rather than gradual, the whole speculation begins to evaporate. The distinction inherent in the Logos speculation may be a distinction of transcendent and immanent, of absolute and relative, of more or less: a distinction between person and person is outside the demands of its purpose. How can a distinct person be the absolute God become relative? And these difficulties reach their climax when we suppose this distinction to be eternal. What function can be conceived for a relative God in the depths of eternity, when nothing existed except God Himself? A meaningless God is just no God at all. Tertullian, in a word, as a convinced adherent of the Logos Christology, was committed to· conceptions which were not capable of holding a doctrine of immanent Trinity. The most that could be expected from him would be that he should approach as closely to a doctrine of Trinity as was possible on his presuppositions _ that he should fill the conceptions of the Logos Christology, the highest as yet developed in the Church, so full that they should be nigh to bursting: We shall see that he did more than this. But in proportion as he did more than this has he transcended what could legitimately have been expected of him; and we shall be forced to allow that, in his effort to do justice to elements of faith brought into prominence in this controversy, he filled the conceptions of the Logos speculation so full that they actually burst in his hands. The Logos Christology, in other words, was stretched by him beyond its tether and was already passing upward in his construction to something better.

A great deal has been said of Tertullian’s failure in perfect consistency: a great deal of his indebtedness to the Monarchians themselves for many of his ideas: a great deal of elements of compromise with his opponents discoverable in his construction. These things are not, however, proofs of weakness, but indications of strength in him. They mean that with all his clearness of grasp upon the Logos Christology, and with all his acuteness in adapting it to meet the problem he was facing, he yet saw the truth of some things for which, for all his acumen, it could not be made to provide - and stretched it to make it cover them also. They mean that he was not misled into the denial of positive elements of truth, always confessed by the Church, by zeal against the body of errorists that had taken them under their especial charge. For it is not quite exact to speak of these elements of truth as accepted by Tertullian at the hands of the Monarchians. They were rather elements of truth embodied in the general Christian confession, hitherto more or less neglected by the theologians, but now thrown into prominence by the presently raging controversy. It is the nemesis of incomplete theories that neglected elements of truth rise up after awhile to vex them. So it happened with the Logos Christology. But Tertullian sought to stretch the Logos Christology to cover these truths, not because they were urged with so much insistence by his opponents - he was not quite the man to meet insistence by yielding: but because they were parts of the Rule of Faith and were universally accepted by Christians as imposed on their belief by the divine Oracles, and he, for his part, was determined to be loyal to the Rule of Faith and to the teaching of Scripture.

There was one thing, in other words, which was more fundamental to Tertullian’s thinking than even the Logos Christology. That was the Rule of Faith- the immemorial belief of Christians, grounded in the teaching of the Word of God.29 The insistence on certain truths by his opponent may have been the occasion of Tertullian’s notice of them: his attempt to incorporate them into his construction was grounded in recognition of them as elements in the universal Christian faith. This Rule of Faith had come down to him from ” the beginning of the Gospel,” as he phrased it; 30 and he recognized it as his first duty to preserve it whole and entire. The Logos Christology had not been able to take up all the items of belief which Christians held essential to their good profession: perhaps it was due to the Monarchian controversy that Christians were enabled to see that clearly. It is to the credit of Tertullian, that seeing it, he sought rather to stretch his inherited Christology to include the facts thus brought sharply to his notice, than to deny the facts in the interest of what must have seemed to him the solidly worked out philosophy of revealed truth. By his sympathetic ·recognition of these elements of truth he built a wider foundation, on which a greater structure could afterward be raised. To his own consciousness the principle of his doctrine remained ever the data of Scripture embodied in the Rule of Faith and interpreted under the categories of the Logos Christology. Beyond the Logos Christology he did not purposely advance. It remained for him to the end the great instrument for the understanding of Scripture. But it happened to him, as it has happened to many besides him, that the process of pouring so much new wine into old bottles had an unhappy effect upon the bottles. This great adherent of the Logos speculation became the prime instrument of its destruction.

What is true in this matter of Tertullian is true also in his own measure of Hippolytus. Both stood firmly on the Rule of Faith: 81 and the instrument for its interpretation used by each alike was the Logos Christology, which both had adopted in its entirety from the Apologists. This accounts for the similarity of their teachings. The difference of their teachings is due very largely to the unequal ability of the two men.32 Tertullian was much the abler man and succeeded much better in making room in his construction for the elements of truth embedded in the Rule of Faith which the Logos Christology found difficulty in assimilating. Callistus was not without some color of justification in excommunicating Hippolytus as well as Sabellius, as alike with him defective in his teaching. Only, Callistus was incapable of perceiving that it was the Logos Christology, and not the facile methods of Monarchian Modalism, which was seriously seeking to embrace and explain all the facts; that in it alone, therefore, was to be found the promise of the better construction yet to come, toward which it was reaching out honest and eager hands. His own shallow opportunism prevented him from apprehending that what was needed was not denial of all real distinction between God and Logos, Father and Son, and therewith the confounding of the entire process of redemption, but the rescue of this distinction from its entanglement with cosmological speculation, and the elevation of it from a mere matter of degrees of divinity to the sphere of personal individualization, while yet it should be jealously guarded from the virtual division of the Godhead into a plurality of deities. Callistus, the politic ruler of a distracted diocese, intent above all on calming dangerous excitement and discouraging schism, ready to purchase peace at any cost, was not capable of such a feat of sound thinking. Hippolytus was too little independent of his inheritance to be capable of it. Even Tertullian was not capable of carrying through such a task to its end: though he was able to advance it a little stage toward its accomplishment. All the circumstances considered, this was a great achievement, and it could not have been accomplished had not Tertullian united to his zeal in controversy and his acumen in theological construction an essential broad-mindedness, an incorruptible honesty of heart and a sure hold on the essentials of the faith. That the account thus suggested correctly represents the facts will appear upon a somewhat more detailed investigation of the exact attitude of Tertullian both to the Logos Christology and to the Rule of Faith. To such an investigation we shall now address ourselves.

Even in his earliest writings there occur passages in which full and convinced expression is given to the speculations of the Logos Christology, from which it appears that from the beginning of his activity as a Christian writer these speculations supplied the molds in which Tertullian’s thought ran. When, for example, in the twenty-first chapter of his “Apology,” which was written about 197, he undertakes to expound to his heathen readers the deity of Christ,33 he identifies Him out of hand with the Logos of Zeno and Cleanthes,34 because, as he says, “we have been taught ” (didicimus) as follows - whereupon he proceeds to set forth the Logos doctrine, thus declared to be to him the traditionary doctrine of the Church.31 “We have been taught,” says he, that the Logos “was produced (prolatum) from God (ex Deo) and in [this] production generated, and therefore is called the Son of God and God, because of (ex) the unity of the substance, since God also is Spirit. Just as when a ray is put forth (porrigitur) from the sun, it is a portion of the whole (portio ex summa), but the sun will be in the ray, because it is a ray of the sun, and is not separated from the substance, but stretched out (non separatur substantia sed extenditur); so Spirit [is extended] from Spirit and God from God, as light is kindled from light. The materire matrix (source of the material) remains entire and undiminished (integra et indefecta) although you draw out from it many branches of its kind (traduces qualitatis): thus also what is derived (profectum) from God is God and the Son of God, and the two are one. In this manner, then, He who is Spirit from Spirit and God from God made another individual in mode [of existence], in grade, not in state (modulo alternum numerum, gradu non statu fecit), and did not separate from but stretched out from the source (et a matrice non recessit sed excessit). This ray of God, then, descended into a certain virgin, as it had always been predicted in times past… .” 36 What we read in the tract” Against Praxeas” embodies the same ideas in the same terms. We must, however, note in more detail how far Tertullian here commits himself to the forms of the Logos speculation. We observe, then, in the first place, that Tertullian with complete conviction shares the fundamental conception out of which the Logos doctrine grows - the conception of the transcendence of God above all possibility of direct relation with a world of time and space. So axiomatic did it seem to him that God in Himself is exalted above direct concernment with the world-process, that when discussing the temporal activities of our Lord, he permits himself to say that such things, hard to believe of the Son and only to be credited concerning Him on the authority of Scripture, could scarcely have been believed of the Father, even if Scripture had explicitly affirmed them of Him.87 That is to say, the doctrine of the transcendence of God, or as Tertullian phrases it, in Scriptural language which had become traditional in this school, of the “invisibility” of God “in the fulness of His majesty,” 38 stood, as a fixed datum, at the root of Tertullian’s whole thought of God. In the. ~ ~e, we observe that Tertullian shared with equal heartiness the current conception of the Logos as, so to speak, th.e. :IA[Qrld-for.m cl.. God. It was, indeed, only in connection with the world, arid as its condition, both with respect to origin and government, that he was accustomed to think of a Logos at all. The prolation of the Logos took place, in his view, only for and with the world, as a necessary mediator, to perform a work which God as absolute could not perform. It was ” then,” says Tertullian with pointed emphasis,39 that the Word assumed” His own form,” when God said, “Let there be light! ” It was only when God was pleased to draw out (edere) into ” their own substances and forms ”

(in substantias et species suas) the things He had planned within Himself, that He put forth (protulit) the Word, in order that all things might be made through Him.40 We observe, in the third place, that Tertullian, with equal heartiness, shared the consequent view that the Logos is not God in His entirety, but only a “portion” of God- a “portion,” that is, as in the ray there is not the whole but only a “portion ” of the sun. The difference seems to be not one of mode only, but of measure. “The Father,” he says, “is the entire substance, but the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole.” 41 He speaks ” of that portion of the whole which was about to retire into the designation of the Son.” 42 To Tertullin.n this idea was self-evident inasmuch as the Logos was to him necessarily produced, or, rather, reduced Divinity-Divinity brought to a level on which it could become creator and principle of the world of time and space.43 We observe, in the_io_urth -place, that Tertullian also accorded with the current conception in thinking of the prolation of the Logos as a voluntary act of God rather than a necessary movemeRt within the divine essence.

89 Loe. cit., chap. vii.: ” Tune igitur etiam ipse sermo speciem et ornatum suum sumit, sonum et vocem, cum dixit deus: fiat lux.”

As there was a time before which the Son was not,” so He came into being by the will of God,‘5 and remains in being to fulfill the will of God, and at last when He has fulfilled the will of God retires once more into the divine unity.46 All this, of course, applies only to the prolate Logos.4JThis whole development of the prolate Logos, therefore, is not only a temporal but a temporary expedient, by means of which God, acting voluntarily, accomplishes a work. When this work is accomplished the arrangements for it naturally cease. The Logos mode of existence thus emerges as an incident in the life of God which need not, perhaps, find a necessary rooting in His nature, but only a contingent rooting in His purposes. In the very nature of the case, therefore, the prolate Logos is dependent on the divine will.48 It is hardly necessary to make a separate fifth observation, therefore, that Tertullian thoroughly shared the subordinationism inherent in the Logos Christology.49 To him the Son, as prolated Logos, was self-evidently less (minor) than the Father, seeing that His prolation occurred by the Father’s will, and in order to do His will. He remains subject to His will,50 and when that will is accomplished returns into the divine bosom. The invisible Father alone possesses the fullness of the divine majesty: the Son is visible pro modulo derivationi.sby reason of the measure of His derivation - and stands related to the Father as a ray does to the sun.61 He is the second, in every sense of the term.

Even such a brief survey as this of the natural forms in which Tertullian’s thought ran makes it exceedingly clear that the prime instrument in his hands for the interpretation of the facts of the Christian revelation was just the Logos Christology taken over in its entirety from his predecessors.

But if the Logos Christology thus supplied to Tertullian the forms of thought with which he approached the problems now brought into renewed prominence, the matter of his thinking was derived from another source, and from a source that lay even more deeply embedded in his convictions. If the Logos Christology was the instrument by means of which he sought to interpret the Rule of Faith, the Rule of Faith supplied the matter to be interpreted. The question that was always pressing upon him, therefore, was whether this matter in its entirety could be interpreted by the Logos Christology. Certainly Tertullian must be credited with a loyal effort to preserve all its data in their integrity, as even his most cursory reader will at once perceive; 02 and in making this effort, largely under the influence of the Monarchian controversy, he found himself compelled to enlarge and modify the contents of the Logos speculation, in order to embrace the data of the Rule of Faith.

In the first place, the Rule of Faith imposed on Tertullian the duty of framing a doctrine of the Holy Spirit as well as of the Son of God. For this, of course, the Logos Christology did not necessarily provide. But it pointed out a road to it by way of analogy. The Apologists, accordingly, though they were absorbed in the doctrine of the Logos and did not always know what to do with the Spirit, yet did not leave the subject so entirely to one side but that they handed down to their successors the beginnings of a doctrine of the Spirit framed on the analogy of this Christology.53 They had already made it a matter of traditionary doctrine, for example, that the Spirit is related to the Son much as the Son is to the Father, and makes a third alongside of the Father and Son.54 Tertullian takes up these somewhat fluid elements of traditional teaching and gives them sharpness and consistency.55 He looks upon the Spirit apparently as a prolation from the Son, as the Son is from the Father, thus preserving, so to speak, a linear development in the evolution of God: 56 but he carefully preserves the upon the Rule of Fait_h as originating in the baptismal formula given by our Lord, and as finding its normal succinct expression in the Baptismal Creed, commonly known as the Apostles’ Creed.

conception of the Father as fons deitatis, and thus frames as his exact formula the assertion that the Spirit, being the third degree in the Godhead, proceeds ” from no other source than from the Father through the Son” (chap. iv.). In his familiar figures, as the Father and Son are represented by the root and the stem of the tree, by the fountain and the river, by the sun and its ray, so the Spirit, being” third from God and the Son,”

is as the fruit of the tree, which is third from the root, or as the stream from the river, which is third from the fountain, or as the apex from the ray, which is third from the sun (chap.

viii.).57 All flows down from the Father through colligated and conjoined grades (per consertos et conexos gradus, chap. viii.

ad fin.), but the immediate connection is of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Paraclete (chap. xxv. ad init.), and thus it may be truly said that the Son received the Spirit from the Father and yet Himself shed Him forth - this ” Third Name in the Godhead and Third Grade in the Divine Majesty, the Declarer of the One Monarchy of God and yet, at the same time, the Interpreter of the Economy” (chap. xxx.). Under the guidance of the Logos speculation Tertullian thus, in the first instance, conceives the Spirit apparently as a prolation of the Son as the Son is of the Father, and as therefore subordinate to the Son as the Son is to the Father: but nevertheless as ultimately deriving from the fons deitatis itself, through the Son, and through the Son subject ultimately to it.08 The consistent extension of the Logos speculation to cover the Third divine Person confessed in the Rule of Faith was, however, only a short step toward embracing the data included in that formula under the categories of the Logos speculation.

The really pressing problem concerned the relations in which trait, and is therefore frequently noted. Thus Hagemann, p. 139, when speaking of Hippolytus, adverts to the difference between the Church’s construction and his, that the one thought of the trinitarian relationships ” after the analogy of a circular motion (Kreisbewegung) and the other as advancing in a straight line.”

the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit stand to one another. In the Rule of Faith - in the Baptismal Formula - they appear as coordinate persons, to each of whom true deity is ascribed, or, rather, to all three of whom the Name is attributed in common. Was the Logos speculation capable of taking up these data into itself and doing full justice to them? Tertullian must be credited with a sincere and a fruitful effort to make it do so. So far as the mere inclusion of the data under a single formula is concerned he found little difficulty. His formula is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one in substance and distinct in person. In this formula he intrenches himself and reiterates and illustrates it with inexhaustible zest. He opens the serious discussion of the tract with a clear enunciation of it drawn out in full detail- crying out against the Monarchian assumption that the unity of the Godhead implies unity of Person, ” as if One might not be All in this way also - viz., in All being of One, by unity of substance, while the mystery (sacramentum) of the oiKovoµta is still preserved, by which the unity is distributed into a Trinity, ordering (dirigens) the three - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - three, however, not in status but in grade, not in substance but in form, not in power but in aspect (species); yet of one substance, and of one status, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one God from whom are reckoned these grades and forms and aspects under the name of the Father and Son and Holy Ghost.” This is Tertullian’s complete formula of Trinity in unity, which he promises to explicate more fully in the remainder of the treatise. This promise he very fairly fulfills-now repeating the entire statement more or less fully and now insisting on this or that element of it.89 One of his favorite methods of indicating briefly the combined sameness and distinction is by employing distinctively the neuter and masculine forms of the words. “I and the Father are one,” says our Lord; and Tertullian lays stress not only on the plural verb-” I and the Father are,” not “am,” one - but on the neuter form of the adjective-” unum,” not ” unus” - as implying ” not singularity of number but unity of essence,” and the like (chap. xxii.). H These Three,” he says again (chap. xxv.), “are unum, not unus, in respect of unity of substance, not singularness of number.” So he rings the changes constantly on the unity of substance and distinction of persons. So far, we shall easily say, so good. For so much the Logos speculation opens the way without straining. It is inherent in it that the divine prolations should be of the very essence of God, while, on the other hand, capable as prolations of acting in some sense as distinct beings. The tug comes when we ask whether this asserted unity of substance provides for the supreme deity of the prolations, so that we can say that Jesus Christ, for example, is all that God is; and whether this asserted distinctness of persons provides for a real individualization of personality, so that each so-called person stands over against the others in permanent distinctness and not in merely apparent and in its very nature temporary objectivation. Certainly the Logos speculation suggests a reduced deity for the prolations, and that in diminishing grades: and a temporal rather than an eternal - whether a parte ante or a parte post - distinction between them. Does Tertullian see glimpses beyond? In such glimpses beyond we shall discover whatever approach he has made to constructing a doctrine of a real Trinity. The hinge of the problem turns on the answers we shall be compelled to give to five questions: (1) Whether Tertullian by his distinction of “persons” intends a distinction which is really personal in the philosophical sense of that term; (2) whether Tertullian supposes this distinction of persons to have been constituted by the prolations of the Logos and Spirit, which, he teaches, took place in order to the creation and government of the world, or to belong rather to the essential mode of existence of God; (3) whether he succeeds in preserving the unity of God despite the distinction of persons which he teaches; (4) whether he is able to ascribe such deity to Christ as to say of Him that He is all that God is; (5) whether he accords to the Holy Spirit also both complete deity and eternal distinctness of personality. We shall need to look at his response to these five questions in turn.

But we shall reserve this for the Second Article.

SECOND ARTICLE 60 IN the First Article it was pointed out that any approach which Tertullian may have made toward formulating a doctrine of a really immane_nt Trinity will be revealed by attending to the responses he makes to five questions. These questions are: (1) Whether he intends a rg_al dis.tin.Qtiio.n of persons, in the philosophical sense of the term, by the distinction he makes between the divine” persons”; (2) whether he supposes this,.,.di..s:tiD.cn of persons to belong to the essential mode of the divine existence, or to have been constituted by those prolations of the Logos and Spirit which, according to his teaching, took place in order to the creation and government of the world; (3) whether he preserves successfully the unity of God in the distinction of persons which he teaches; (4) whether he conceives deity in Christ to be all that it is in the Father; (5) whether he accords to the Holy Spirit also both absolute deity and eternal distinctness of personality. We shall endeavor now to obtain Tertullian’s responses to these questions.

that Tertullian by his formula of three persons in one substance may have meant very little more than the Monarchians themselves might supposedly be able to grant. In his ” History of Dogma ” Harnack returns to the matter 63 with some persistency and, we might almost say, dogmatism. Tertullian he asserts, (iv. p. 144),64 was not dealing with philosophical conceptions, but employing rather “the method of legal fictions.” ” It was easy for him,” continues Harnack, “by the help of the distinction between ’ substance ’ and ’ person ’ current among the jurists, to explain and establish against the Monarchians, not alone the old, ecclesiastical, preeminently Western formula, ’ Christus deus et homo,’ but also the formula, ’ pater, filius et spiritus sanctus- unus deus.’ ’ Substance’ (Tertullian never says’ Nature’) is, in the language of the jurists, nothing personal; it rather corresponds to ‘property’ in the sense of possession, or ’ substance ’ in distinction from appearance or ’ status ’; ’ Person,’ again, is in itself nothing substantial, but rather a subject having legal standing and capable of holding property (das rechts- und besitzfahige Subject), who may as well as not possess various substances, as, on the other hand, it is possible that a single substance may be found in the possession of several persons.” “Speaking juristically,” he remarks again (iv. p. 122) ,65 “there is as little to object to the formula that several persons are holders of one and the same substance (property), as to the other that one person may possess unconfused several substances.” That is to say, apparently, when Tertullian describes God as ” one substance in three persons,” we may doubt whether any other conception floated before his mind than that one piece of property may very well be held in undivided possession by three several individuals; and when he speaks of our Lord as one person with two substances, we may question whether he meant more than that the same individual may very well appear in court with two distinct “properties.”

The theory certainly lacks somewhat in definiteness of statement,86 and leaves us a little uncertain whether its application to Tertullian’s teaching results in lowering the conception we suppose him to have attached to the term ” person ” or that we suppose him to have attached to the term ” substance.” The fact seems to be that Harnack, at least, himself vacillates in his application of it. Despite the passages already quoted, he sometimes speaks as if when Tertullian says that “Father, Son and Holy Ghost are three persons in the unity of the Godhead,” we should raise the question whether by” persons ” he means anything more than ” capacities” - that is, whether the persons were conceived by him as much more than simply “nomina” (Harnack, iv. p. 57; “Against Praxeas/’ 30), and whether, therefore, his doctrine was not at least as nearly related to Monarchianism as to Nicene Trinitarianism (so Harnack, iv. p. 57, note). On the other hand, when he says that” God and man, two substances, are one Christ,” we seem to be expected to raise the question whether by” substance” he means much more than ” status, virtus, potestas ” - that is, whether he really conceived the individual Jesus Christ as including in Himself two unconfused natures, or only two aspects of being. The sense of confusion produced by this attempt so to state the theory as to make it do double duty - and that, in each instance of its application - is already an indication that it is not easy to adjust it precisely to the facts it is called in to explain. What we are asked to do apparently is not merely to presume that Tertullian derived his nomenclature from the law courts; but to suppose that he was not quite sure in his own mind in what sense he was borrowing it. In other words, we are to suppose that he began by borrowing the terms, leaving the senses in which he should employ them to be fixed afterward; instead of beginning, as he must have done, with the conceptions to express which he borrowed or framed terms.

The real difficulty with the theory, however, is that it seems to be entirely without support in Tertullian’s own usage of the words, and much more in his definitions and ~llustrations of their meaning. Harnack urges in its support little beyond the two somewhat irrelevant facts that Tertullian is known to have been a jurist, and so might well be familiar with juristic language, and that he used by predilection the term ” substance ” rather than ” nature.” 67 On the other hand, that Tertullian is here speaking as the heir of the Apologists and is dealing with conceptions not of his own framing, that, moreover, the whole drift of his discussion is philosophical, and that, above all, his own explanations of his meaning - as, for example, in the illustrations he makes use of - fix on the terms he employs a deeper sense, put this whole theory summarily out of court.

It has accordingly made very few converts, and has more than once been solidly refuted.as In the aspect of it in which it comes especially before us in our present discussion, it certainly seems impossible to give it a hospitable reception.

If there is anything, indeed, that seems clear in Tertullian’s exposition it is that he deals seriously with the personality .which he attributes to the three distinctions of the “economy.” 69 This is indeed the very hinge on which the whole controversy which he was urging so sharply against the Monarchian conception turns. Whatever care he exhibits in guarding the unity of the divine substance, therefore, by denying that was therefore avoided by careful writers. Harnack’s notion that Tertullian’s preference of substantia has some deep theological significance seems, therefore, peculiarly unfortunate. For a refutation of it on its merits see Stier, as cited, pp. 76 sq. Bethune-Baker (” The Meaning of Homoousios in the ‘Constantinopolitan’ Creed,” in “Texts and Studies,” J. A. Robinson, ed., vii. 1, pp. 16 and 65; cf. also Journal of Theological Studies, iv. p. 440) also appears to overstrain the distinction between” Substance” and” Nature” in Tertullian and his successors. Their preference for ” substantia ” is sufficiently accounted for by the greater precision of the word and its freedom from qualitative implications (cf. Quintilian’s distinction of” substantia” and” qualitas” in 7. 3. 6). The” natura ” of a thing suggests implications of kind; ” substantia ” raises no question of kind and asserts merely reality.

any separatio, or divisio, or dispersio 70 has taken place or could take place in it, is necessarily matched by the equal emphasis he places on the reality of the distributio, distinctio, dispositio 11 that has place in it, and by virtue of which He who is eternally and unchangeably one (unum) is nevertheless not one (unus), but three-not, indeed, in status, substance, power, but in grade, form, species, aspect.12 The point of importance to be noted here is not merely that Tertullian calls these distinctions “persons ” (which he repeatedly does),73 but that he makes them persons by whatsoever designation he marks them. The whole of Scripture, he declares, demands this of its readers: it attests clearly the existence and distinction of the Trinity, and indeed establishes the Rule that He who speaks and He of whom He speaks and He to whom He speaks cannot possibly be the same; nor does it fail to place thus by the first and second the third person also.74 Only on the basis of this tripersonality of God, he urges, can the plural forms in which God speaks of Himself in Scripture be explained: 75 and how can one issue what can justly be called a command except to another? “In what sense, however, you ought to understand Him to be another,” he adds, ” I have already explained- on the ground of personality, not of substance - in the way of distinction not of division.” 76 In this whole discussion, Tertullian’s watchword was necessarily the economy: and the economy was just the Trinity in the unity. Had he not felt bound to assert the economy, there had been no quarrel between him and the Monarchians, whose watchword was the unity. As it was, he required to begin his polemic against them with the distinct positing of the question: and this involved the distinct enunciation of the doctrine of plural personality in the Godhead. We have always believed and do now still believe, he says,77 that there is one only God plains,8° such a Trinity, flowing down from the Father through intertwined and connected steps does not at all disturb the monarchy, while it at the same time guards the state of the economy. Men must not be permitted to extol the monarchy at the expense of the economy, contending for the identity of the Father and Son, whereas the very names, Father and Son, plainly declaring their distinct personality, proclaim the economy 81 - lest under pretense of the monarchy men come to hold to neither Father nor Son, abolishing all distinctions in the interest of their monarchy.82 Thus the discussion runs on, upholding the economy against the falsely conceived monarchy, to end in the same note 83 - in the declaration that the Son, the second name in the Godhead, and the second degree of the divine Majesty, has shed forth on the Church in these latter days the promised gift, ” even the Holy Spirit - the Third Name in the Godhead and the Third Degree of the Divine Majesty, the Declarer of the One Monarchy of God, but at the same time the Interpreter of the Economy, to every one who hears and receives the words of the new prophecy; _and the ’ Leader into all truth,’ such as is in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, according to the mystery of the doctrine of Christ.” ~ h e economy is, in e:ffect, he charges, to revert to Judaism - for to Jews not to Christians it belongs ” so to believe in one God as to refuse to reckon the Son besides Him, and after the Son the Spirit.” 84 The distinctive mark of Christianity to him, thus, is that the unity of God is so held that God is now openly known in His proper names and persons.85 Among the passages in which Tertullian exhibits with especial emphasis the distinction which he erects between the Father, Son, and Spirit under the name of persons there is a striking one 86 in which he is replying to the Callistan formula which made the Father not indeed suffer in and of Himself, but °8 Chap. viii. end. 84’ Chap. xxxi.

85 Chap. xxxi.

81 Chap. ix. 86 Chap. xxix.

82 Chap. x.

83 Chap. xxx.

participate in the suffering of the Son. He makes his primary appeal here to the impassibility of God as such, and then falls to magnifying the distinction between the Father and the Son. ” The Father,” he asserts, “is separate from the Son, though not from God.” The meaning seems to be that the Son is the name specifically of the incarnated Logos, and the incarnated Logos - as God, indeed, one in substance with the Father - is, as incarnated, something more, viz., flesh as well; and on this side of His being, which is the only side in which He suffered (for the Son, under the conditions of His existence as God, Tertullian allows, is as incapable of suffering as the Father) is not one with God, but separate from Him. The Monarchian might certainly reply that on this showing the Father Himself, if conceived to be incarnate, might be as truly said to share in the sufferings of the Son, or the flesh, as the Son, incarnated, could be said to have suffered. If the sufferings of the flesh were not of the flesh alone, but the incarnated deity stood in some relation to them, this would be, on Tertullian’s own showing, as conceivable of the Father, deemed incarnate, as of the Son. Tertullian, therefore, attempts to help his answer out by means of a simile. If a river, he says, is soiled with mud, this miring of the stream does not affect the fountain, though the river flows from the fountain, is identical in substance with it, and is not separated from it: and although it is the water of the fountain which suffers in the stream, yet since it is affected only in the stream and not in the fountain, the fountain is not contaminated, but only the river that_ has issued from the fountain. We are not concerned now with the consistency of Tertullian: how he could say in one breath that the Son as God is as impassible, being God Himself, as the Father, and in the next that it is the very water from the fountain - the very substance of God in its second distinction -that is affected by the injury which has befallen it. What it concerns us to notice is, that in this illustration Tertullian very much magnifies the distinction between the persons of the Godhead. The Son is so far distinct from ·the Father that He may be involved in sufferings which do not reach back to or affect the Father. The stream may be the fountain flowing forth: but the stream is so far distinct from the fountain, that what affects it is no longer felt in the fountain. Here is the individualization of personal life in an intense form, and an indication of the length to which Tertullian’s conception of the personal distinction went.

In another passage 87 Tertullian announces the same results without the aid of a figure. He is engaged in discriminating between mere effiuxes of power or other qualities from God and the prolation of a real and substantial person: in doing this, he magnifies the distinction between the original source and the prolation. Nothing that belongs to another thing is precisely that thing: and nothing that proceeds from it can be simply identified with it. The Spirit is God, no doubt; and the Word is God; because they proceed from God, from His very substance. But they are not actually the very same as He from whom they proceed. Each is God of God: each is a substantiva res; but each is not ipse Deus; but only ” so far God as He is of the same substance with God Himself, and as being an actually existing thing, and as a portion of the Whole.”

In still another passage Tertullian is repelling the Monarchians’ scoff that as a word is no substantial thing, but a mere voice and sound made by the mouth, merely so much concussed air, intelligible to the ear as a symbol of thought, but in itself nothing at all: therefore (so they argued) the Word of God- the Logos - is to be conceived not as a substantial thing distinguishable from the Father, but only as a symbol of intelligible meaning. Tertullian reproaches them for being unwilling to allow that the Word is a really substantive being, having a substance of its own - an objective thing and a person - who, by virtue of His constitution as a second to God, makes, with God, two, the Father and the Son, God and the Word. He argues on two grounds that the Logos must have this substantial existence. The one is that He came forth from so great a substance: God who is Himself the fullness of Being, cannot be presumed to prolate an empty thing. The other is that He is Himself the author of substantial things: how could He, who was Himself nothing, produce things which are realities, with substantial existence? Whatever else this argument proves, it certainly proves that Tertullian conceived of the distinction between God the Father and God the Son as attaining the dignity of distinct individuality. “Whatever, therefore” - he closes the discussion with these words - ” Whatever, therefore, has the substance of the Word, that I designate a Person. I claim for it the name of Son, and, recognizing the Son, I assert His distinction as second to the Father.”

truth subjected to interpretation by the Logos speculation was not quite tractable to it, and it is interesting to inquire whether Tertullian betrays any consciousness of this fact :- whether in his dealing with the data embedded in the Rule of Faith he exhibits any tendency to carry back the distinction of persons in the Godhead behind the prolations by which the Logos and Spirit proceeded from it for the purpose of producing the world of time and space. So loyal an adherent of the Rule of Faith might well be expected to deal faithfully with its data, and to seek to do something like justice to them even when they appeared to be intractable to his ordinary instrument of interpretation. And so bold a thinker might well be incited by the pressure of such data to ask himself if there were nothing in the fons deitatis itself which might be recognized as a kind of prophecy or even as a kind of predetermination of the prolations which ultimately proceeded from it - if the very issue of these prolations do not presuppose in the Godhead itself a certain structure, so to speak, which involved the promise and potency of the prolations to come - if, in a word, the distinctions brought into manifestation by the prolations must not be presumed to have preexisted in a latent or less manifest form in the eternal monad, out of which they ultimately proceeded. That some indications exist of such a tendency on Tertullian’s part to push the personal distinctions behind the prolations into the Godhead itself is perhaps universally recognized. It is frequently denied, to be sure, that this tendency goes very far. Harnack’s form of statement is that it gives to Tertullian’s teaching ” a strong resemblance to the doctrine of an immanent Trinity, without being such.” 89 Tertullian, he says, knew ” as little of an immanent Trinity as the Apologists,” and his Trinity “only appears such, because the unity of the substance is very vigorously emphasized.” 90 Johannes Stier holds essentially the same opinion. “Of an immanent Trinity in Tertullian,” 91 he argues,” there can be no talk, because he is absolutely explicit that a plural personality came into existence for the purpose of the world. Without the world, the primal unity would have abided. It is indeed true that the Logos and the Spirit were immanent in the unity of the divine original essence from the beginning, but nevertheless not - and this is the point - in a personal manner! From the beginning God, the divine original-essence, was alone; alone precisely as person (cf. “Against Praxeas,” chap. v). From this (first) person, no doubt, absolutely immediately, the Logos (ratio, sermo) was distinguished as subject, but not yet as (second) person - he became person only pretemporally-temporally. And as for the Spirit, the matter is perfectly analogous in His case (cf. “Against Praxeas,” chap. vi). The Trinity of Tertullian is purely (against Schwane, p. 164, and others) economical, conceived solely with reference to the world; nothing is easier to see if we have the will to see it (cf. also Gieseler, p. 137; Harnack, i. p. 536; Huber, p. 117).” Nevertheless Harnack not only can speak of Tertullian as “creating the formulas of succeeding orthodoxy,” but can even declare that” the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity already announced its presence even in its details, in Tertullian.” 02 And Stier is forced to acknowledge that Tertullian came within a single step of an immanent Trinity.93 “There needed, we must admit,” he remarks, “only a single step more to arrive at the eternal personal being of the sermo in God, to establish an eternal, immanent relation between the divine original-essence and His Logos as two divine personalities, to advance thence to the immanent Trinity. But Tertullian stopped with conceiving the sermo from eternity, it is true, along with the ratio - and the discernment of this already itself means something - but still only as the impersonal basis (Anlage) of a future personal sermo.” The reason of Tertullian’s failure to take the last step Stier, like Hagemann °4 and others before him, finds in the fact that Tertullian ·connected the personal sermo so intimately with the world that had he conceived the one as eternal, he must needs have conceived the other as eternal also: and as he was not preparea to think of the world as eternal, neither could he ascribe eternity to the personal Logos (cf. “Against Praxeas,” chap. vi. sq.).

Possibly there is a petitio principii embedded in the terms in which this reason is stated. Tertullian certainly connected the prolate Logos so closely with the world that we could scarcely expect him to separate the two. But whether that involves a similar inseparable connection between the personal Logos and the world is precisely the question at issue. The prolation and the personality of the Logos seem to be for the moment confused by our critics, doubtless because it is judged that the two went together in Tertullian’s mind: but this judgment cannot be justified by merely repeating it. Meanwhile we note that it is allowed that Tertullian did conceive the sermo as eternally existent along with the ratio, and this is rightly regarded as a matter of some significance and as equivalent at least to the postulation of something in the eternal mode of existence of God which supplies the basis (Anlage) for a future personal Logos. What this something was Stier does not indeed tell us, contenting himself merely with denying that it amounted in Tertullian’s thought to a personal distinction, prior to the prolation of the Logos. He uses a German term to designate it - Anlage - which might be fairly pressed to cover all that Tertullian expresses as to his personal Logos, when he speaks of it as a distributio, distinctio, dispositio, dispensatio: and Stier can scarcely mean less than that Tertullian recognized in the eternal mode of existence of the Godhead such a distinction, disposition, distribution, dispensation, as manifested itself in the outgoing from Him of a portio into a truly personal distinction when He was about to create the world. Less than this would come perilously near to saying merely that the Son was potentially in the Father before He actually came into existence from the Father, which, as George Bull repeatedly points out, is no more than can be said of all created beings, all of which (according to Tertullian also), before they were produced actually, preexisted in the thought and power of God.95 By as much as Stier cannot mean that Tertullian recognized in the original mode of the divine existence no deeper basis for the personal prolation of the Word than there was for the production of the creature-world, by so much must he be supposed to mean that Tertullian recognized that the very structure, so to speak, of the Godhead, from all eternity, included in it some disposition by virtue of which the prolation of the Logos, and afterward that of the Spirit, were provided for as manifestations of an eternal distinction in the Godhead. This certainly leaves only a short step to the recognition of an immanent Trinity; so short a step, indeed, that it is doubtful whether it does not lead inevitably on to it. The question is narrowed down at any rate to whether distinctions eternally existent in the Godhead, and afterward manifested in the prolate Logos and the prolate Spirit as truly personal, were conceived as already personal in the eternal mode of existence of God or as made such only by the acts of prolation themselves. We imagine that the average reader of Tertullian, while he will not fail to note how much the prolations meant to Tertullian’s thought, will not fail to note, on the other hand, that these prolations rested for Tertullian on distinctions existent in the Godhead prior to all prolation, as the appropriate foundations for the prolations; nor will he fail to note further that Tertullian sometimes speaks of these ante-prolation distinctions in a manner which suggests that he conceived them as already personal.

The whole matter has been solidly argued, once for all, in the tenth chapter of the third book of George Bull’s” Defensio Fidei Nicaenre ” (written in 1680, published in 1685). That this notable book is marred by special pleading, and that Bull shows a less keen historical conscience, as Baur puts it,06 or as we should rather say, a less acute historical sense, than Petavius, his chief opponent in this famous debate, we suppose can scarcely be denied. In the main matter of dispute between these two great scholars, we can but think Petavius had the right of it. The position which Petavius takes up,97 indeed, appears to involve little more than recognizing that the literary tradition of the Church, prior to the Council of Nice, was committed to the Logos Christology: while Bull undertakes the impossible task, as it seems to us, of explaining the whole body of ante-Nicene speculation in terms of Nicene orthodoxy. The proper response to Petavius would have been to point out that the literary tradition, running through ” Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus, Tertullian, Lactantius,” together with ” certain others, such as Origen,” 98 is not to be identified at once with the traditionary teaching of the Church, but represents rather a literary movement or theological school of thought, which attempted with only partial success a specific philosophizing of the traditionary faith of the Church. The measure of success which Bull achieved in explaining this literary tradition in harmony with the traditional faith of the Church - which was rather to be sought in the Rule of Faith and the na’ive Christian consciousness of the times - is due to the constant referes e.g., whether the Son was begotten from the Father as respects substance:. and he considers that the ground of the differences among the Fathers which Petavius adduced was due to an attempt to find scholastic definitions among them. In his own faith he reverts to the pre-Augustinian period, … and sees himself driven back upon the Logos-idea, … and in this driftage we see the beginning of the destruction of the dogma even in the Church itself.” It probably is a fact that every attempt to revert from the Augustinian to the Nicene construction of the Trinity marks a stage of weakening hold upon the doctrine itself. With all Bull’s zeal for the doctrine, therefore, his mode of defending it is an indication of lack of full confidence in it, and in essence is an attempt to establish some compromise with the growing forces of unbelief. The same phenomenon is repeating itself in our own day: cf. Prof. L. L. Paine’s “The Evolution of Trinitarianism,” the assault of which on the Augustinian construction of the doctrine is a sequence of a lowered view of the person of Jesus gained from a critical reconstruction of the Bible. ence which the writers with whom he deals made in their thinking to the Rule of Faith, of which they were always conscious as underlying their speculations and supplying the norm to which they strove to make their conclusions as far as possible conform; as well as to the survival in the final product which we know as Nicene theology of such elements of the Logos speculation as could be assimilated by it. He was able, therefore, to show repeatedly that the very men whom Petavius adduced as teachers of the inadequate formula betrayed here and there consciousness of elements of truth for which this formula, strictly interpreted, left no place; and also that language much the same as theirs - and conceptions not far removed from theirs - might easily be turned up in writers of unimpeachable orthodoxy living after the Council of Nice. In both matters he has done good service. It is unfair not to remember that these earlier writers wished to be and made a constant effort to remain in harmony with the Rule of Faith; and that we do not obtain their whole thought, therefore, until we place by the side of their speculative elaborations the elements of truth which they also held, for which these speculations nevertheless made no place. They were in intention, at all events, orthodox; and the failure of their theory to embrace all that orthodoxy must needs confess was an indication rather of the inadequacy of the theory to which they had committed their formal thinking, than of any conscious willingness on their part to deny or neglect essential elements of the truth. And it is useful, on the other hand, to be reminded that their unwearying effort to do justice - as far as their insight carried them - to the whole deposit of the faith bore its appropriate fruit, first, in the gradual, almost unnoted passing of their theory itself into something better, as the Nicene orthodoxy supplanted because transcending it, and next in the projection into the Nicene orthodoxy itself of many of the characteristic modes of thought and forms of expression of the earlier theory - conditioning both the conceptions and the terms used to embody them which entered as constituent elements into the new and better construction. Meanwhile, to fail to appreciate this historic evolution, and to attempt to interpret the inadequate conceptions of the earlier thinkers as only somewhat clumsily expressed enunciations of Nicene orthodoxy, is a grave historical fault, and could not fail to fill Bull’s book with expositions which give it as a whole the appearance of an elaborate piece of special pleading. Only when the writer with whom he chances in any given passage to be dealing had become sharply aware - or at least uneasily conscious - of one or another of the elements of truth embodied in the Rule of Faith for which the speculation he had adopted as yet provided no place, and was really striving to take it up into his theory, make even by violence a place for it, and do justice to it, is Bishop Bull’s exposition altogether admirable. This is the case with Tertullian in the matter of the eternal distinctions in the Godhead, and the result is that Bishop Bull, in the chapter in which he deals with this subject, has performed a delicate piece of expository work with a skill and a clearness which leave little to be desired.

He begins the discussion by adducing what is perhaps the most striking of the passages in which Tertullian appears explicitly to deny the eternity of the personal distinctions in the Godhead. It is to be found in the third chapter of his treatise against Hermogenes and runs as follows: ” Because God is a · Father and God is a Judge, it does not on that account follow that, because He was always God, He was always a Father and a Judge. For He could neither have been a Father before the Son, nor a Judge before transgression. But there was a time when there was no transgression, and no Son, the one to make the Lord a Judge, and the other a Father.” Here certainly, apart from the context, and that wider context of the author’s known point of view, there appears to be a direct assertion that there was a time before which the Son was not: and this falls in so patly with the Logos speculation which assigns a definite beginning to the prolated Logos, that it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Tertullian means to date the origination of the Logos at this time. Such a conclusion would, however, be erroneous; and it is just in the doctrine of the prolation of the Logos at a definite time that the passage finds its juster explanation. It emerges that the term ” Son ” in Tertullian’s nomenclature designates distinctively the prolate Logos. He therefore asserts nothing in the present passage concerning the eternity or non-eternity of personal distinctions in the Godhead. He affirms only that God became Father when the Logos was prolated, seeing that the Logos became Son only at his prolation. Bishop Bull animadverts not unjustly on a tendency of Tertullian exhibited here to overacuteness in argument and to readiness to make a point at some cost: but he fairly makes out his case that in the present instance Tertullian is to be interpreted in this somewhat artificial sense - as if one should say there was a time when God was not the Creator, because creation occurred at a definite point of time, before which therefore God was existent indeed, but not as Creator.99 So God became Father, not when the Logos came into existence, but when He became a Son. By this neat piece of exposition Bishop Bull seeks to remove the antecedent presumption against Tertullian’s admission .of eternal distinctions in the Godhead, which would arise from an explicit assertion on his part that there was a time before which the Logos was not - that is to say, the prolate Logos. He shows that this is only Tertullian’s way of saying that the Logos was not always prolate.

He then wisely proceeds at once to a discussion of the principal passage, wherein Tertullian seems to recognize personal distinctions in the Godhead prior to the prolations of Logos and Spirit. This is, of course, the very remarkable discussion in the fifth chapter of the tract, ” Against Praxeas,” in which Tertullian gives, as it were, a complete history of the Logos.100 In this passage Tertullian begins by affirming that “before all things ” - alike before the creation of the world and the generation of the Son, that is to say, the prolation of the LogosGod was alone (solus). He immediately corrects this, however, by saying that by” alone” he means only that there was nothing extrinsic to God by His side: for not even then was He really alone (solus), seeing that He had with Him that which He had within Himself, namely, His Reason. This Reason, he continues, is what the Greeks call the Logos, and the Latins are accustomed to call Sermo - though Sermo is an inadequate translation, and it would be better to distinguish and say that Reason must antedate Speech, and that God rather had Reason with Him from the beginning, while He had Speech only after He had sent it forth by utterance - that is to say, at the prolation. This distinction, however, adds Tertullian immediately, is really a refinement of little practical importance. The main thing is that” although God had not yet sent His Word, He nevertheless already had Him within Himself, with and in Reason itself, as He silently considered and determined with Himself what He was afterward to speak through the Word.” Thus even in the silence of eternity, when God had not yet spoken, the Word in its form of Reason was with God, and God was therefore not alone. To illuminate his meaning, Tertullian now introduces an illustration drawn from human consciousness. He asks his readers to observe the movements that go on within themselves when they hold silent converse · with themselves; whenever they think, there is a word; whenever they conceive, there is reason. Speaking thus in the mind, the word stands forth as a “conlocutor,” in which reason dwells.101 “Thus,” adds Tertullian, “the word is, in some sort, a second within you, by means of which you speak in thinking, and by means of which you think in speaking: this word is another.” 102 Now, he reasons, all this is, of course, carried on in God on a higher plane (plenius), and it is not venturesome to affirm that ” even before the creation of the universe 103 God was not alone, seeing that He had within Him both Reason and, intrinsic in Reason, His Word, which He made a second to Himself by agitating it within Himself.” This Word, having within Himself Reason and Wisdom, His inseparables, He at length put forth (protulit) when it at length pleased Him to create the universe, that is, to draw out (edere) into their own substances and kinds the things He had determined on within Himself by means of this very Reason and Word.104 -1(._ Nothing can be clearer than that in this passage Tertullian carries back the distinction manifested by the prolate Logos into the depths of eternity. It already existed, he says, within the silent God before the generation of the Word, that is, before the prolation of the Logos. He explicitly distinguishes its mode of preexistence from that of things to be created, which” having been thought out and disposed,” by means of that Word who was also the Reason of God, existed ” in Dei sensu,” and only needed to be drawn out in their substances and kinds - whereas He, the Word, from eternity coexisted with God as ” a second,” ” another.” All this Bishop Bull points out with great lucidity. He directs attention first to Tertullian’s sharp discrimination at the outset between God’s eternal existence ” alone,” so far as external accompaniment is concerned, and his inner companionship - so that He was never “alone,” but ever had with Him, i.e., within Him, His “fellow,” the Logos. He next calls attention to the fact that by Reason in this context Tertullian does not mean God’s faculty of ratiocination, by virtue of which He was rational, but a really subsisting lvvo~a - the verbum mentis of the schools. Still further, he animadverts on Tertullian’s admission that the distinction he was drawing between the Reason and the Word was not drawn by Christians at large who, translating the Greek word “Logos” in John i. 1, by the Latin Sermo, were accustomed to say simply that “the Word was in the beginning,” i.e., eternally, and that “with God.” In doing this he adverts to Tertullian’s admission that he lays little stress on this distinction himself, and is fain himself to allow that the “Word ” is coeternal with ” Reason ” - that is to say, of course, the ” inner Word,” not yet uttered for the purpose of creation: and further, that he allows that the Word consists of Reason, and existed in this His hypostasis or substance before He became the Word by utterance. Then, arriving at the apex of his argument, he points out that ” Tertullian teaches that the Word, even anterior to His mission and going out from God the Father, existed with the Father as a Person distinct from Him.” This, (1) because God is said not to be “alone ”; but He only is not alone with whom is another person present. If through all eternity God was unipersonal, and there was not in the divine essence one and another, then God was alone. Hence God was not unipersonal, since He is affirmed not to have been alone. (2) Because in the illustration from human experience Tertullian distingutShes between the quasi-personality of the human inner word and the real personality of the divine inner Word. The whole drift of the illustration turns on the idea that ” what occurs in man, God’s image, is merely the shadow of what occurs really and in very fact in God.” Finally, Bull argues that Tertullian clearly identifies the “Reason that coexisted with God from eternity with the Word prolated from Him at a definite point of time, and makes one as much personal as the other, conceiving nothing to have occurred at the prolation but the prolation itself - the Word remaining all the while, because God, unchangeable. This argument is expanded in a supplementary reason which Bull gives for his conclusion by the help of a passage which occurs in the twenty-seventh chapter of the tract, ” Against Praxeas.” In this passage Tertullian argues that the Word, because God, is “immutabilis et informabilis ” - unchangeable and untransformable: since God never either ceases to be what He was or begins to be what He was not. How, then, Bull asks, can Tertullian have believed that the Word, who is God, began to be a person only at His prolation, or, indeed, for that is what is really in question, began at that time only to be at all? 105 From such passages, Bull justly suggests, we may learn that by all that Tertullian says of the prolations of the Logos and Spirit he does not mean to detract in any way from the unchangeableness of the divine persons concerned in these acts: nothing intrinsic was, in his view, either added to or taken from either of the two, seeing that each is the same God, eternal and unchangeable. ” Tertullian does indeed teach ” - thus Bull closes the discussion - ” that the Son of God was made, and was called the Word (Verbum or Sermo), from some definite beginning; i.e. at the time when He went out from God the Father, with the voice, ‘Let there be light,’ in order to arrange the universe. But yet that he believed that that very hypostasis, which is called the Word (Sermo or Verbum) and Son of God, is eternal, I have, I think, abundantly demonstrated.” 106 tion of derogating in any way from the unity of God. If in his debate with the Monarchians his especial task was to vindicate the oLKovoµia, the conditions of that debate required of him an equal emphasis on the ” monarchy.” And he is certainly careful to give it, insisting and insisting again on the unity of that one God whom alone Christians worship. This insistence on the unity of God has come, indeed, to be widely represented as precisely the peculiarity of Tertullian’s doctrine of God. Says Loofs: 107 “Tertullian’s Logos doctrine waxed into a doctrine of the Trinity (trinitas occurs first in him) because Tertullian sought to bring the Apologetic traditions into harmony with the stricter monotheism of the Asiatic theology.” Similarly Harnack supposes that Monarchianism exercised a strong influence on Tertullian, ” spite of the fact that he is opposing it,” and remarks in proof that ” no thought is so plainly expressed ” by him in his tract, ” Against Praxeas” ” as this, that Father, Son and Spirit are unius substantire, that is oµoovuwi ”; 108 and again, that ” Tertullian in so far as he designated Father, Son, and Spirit as one substance expressed their unity as strongly as possible.” 109 We may attribute the influence which led Tertullian to lay the stress he did on the unity of God to whatever source we choose, but we must acknowledge that Tertullian himself did not trace it to the Monarchians. Though, no doubt, the necessity he felt upon him not to neglect this great truth was intensified by the fact that it was just with Monarchians that he was contending, yet Tertullian is not himself conscious of indebtedness to them for either his conception of it or his zeal in its behalf. To him it is the very principium of Christianity and the very starting-point of the Rule of Faith. Though he recognizes a monadistic monarchy as rather Jewish than Christian, therefore, and is prepared for a certain pluralism in his conception of God, all this is with him conditioned upon the preservation of the monarchy, and he has his own way of reconciling the monarchy, in which all his Christian thinking is rooted, on the one side, with the economy, which he is zealous to assert, on the other.

This way consists, briefly, in insistence not merely that the three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, are of one substance, but that they are of one undivided substance. Though there is a dispositio, distinctio between them, there is no divisio, separatio. It is not enough for him that the Three should be recognized as alike in substance, condition, pow~r.110 What he insists on is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are inseparable from one another and share in a single undivided substance - that it is therefore ” not by way of diversity that the Son differs from the Father, but by distribution: it is not by division that He is different, but by distinction.” m ” I say,” he reiterates, they are “distinct, not separate ” (distincte, non divise) .” m They are distinguished “on the ground of personality, not of substance - in the way of distinction, not of division,” 113 ” by disposition, not by division.” The ill-disposed and perverse may indeed press the distinction into a separation, but the procession of the Son from the Father “is like the ray’s procession from the sun, and the river’s from the fountain, and the tree’s from the seed” 114 - and thus the distinction betw.een them tnay be maintained “without destroying their inseparable union - as of the sun and the ray, and the fountain and the river.” 116 By the aid of such illustrations Tertullian endeavored to tnake clear that in distinguishing the persons he allowed no division of substance. His conception was that as the sun flows out into its beams while yet the beams remain connected inseparably with the sun, and the river flows out of the fountain but maintains an inseparable connection with it, so the Son and Spirit flow out from the Father while remaining inseparable from Him. There is, in a word, an unbroken continuity of substance, although the substance is drawn out into - if we may speak after the manner of men - a different mold. The con- °11 Chap. ii. 118 Chap.xii.; cf.xxi.xxii. 114 Chap. xxii.

111 Chap. ix. 116 Chap. xxvii. 112 Chap. xi.

ception is that the prolation of the Logos - and afterward of the Spirit proximately from the Logos - is rather of the nature of a protrusion than an extrusion: the Godhead is, now, of a new shape, so to speak, but remains the Godhead still in its undivided and indivisible unity. As Tertullian exprfsses it sharply in the twenty-first chapter of the “Apology”: “Just as when a ray is shot forth (porrigitur) from the sun, it is a portion of the whole, but the sun will be in the ray because it is a ray of the sun, and is not separated from the substance but is extended (extenditur), so from Spirit [is extended] Spirit, and from God, God, as light is kindled from light. The materim matrix remains integra et indefecta, although you draw out from it a plurality of traduces qualitatis; and thus what has come forth (profectum) out of God is God, and the Son of God, and the two are one. Similarly as He is Spirit from Spirit and God from God, he is made a second member in manner of existence, in grade not state, and has not receded from the matrix but exceeded beyond it (et a matrice non recessit sed excessit) .” In a word, the mode of the prolation is a stretching out of the Godhead, not a partition of the Godhead: the unity of the Godhead remains integra et indefecta.

The unity of the Godhead is thus preserved through the prolations themselves, which are therefore one in a” numerical unity,” as it afterward came to be spoken of - though in Tertullian’s usage this language would not be employed, but he would rather say that the persons differ in number, as first, second and third, while the substance remains undivided. It is precisely on the ground that in their view the prolations involved a division and separation of substance that he separates himself from the Valentinians.116 “Valentinus,” says he, ” divides and separates his prolations from their author… But this is the prolation of the truth, the guardian of the unity, wherein we declare that the Son is a prolation of the Father without being separated from Him. For God sent forth the Word (as the Paraclete also declares 117) just as the root puts forth the tree, and the fountain the river, and the sun the ray. For these are 1rpo/30)..a£ of the substances from which they proceed… . But still the tree is not severed from the root, nor the river from the fountain, nor the ray from the sun; and neither the Word separated from God… . In like manner the Trinity, flowing down from the Father, through intertwined and connected steps, does not at all disturb the monarchy, while it at the same time guards the state of the economy.” 118 Harnack, therefore,119 does considerably less than justice to Tertullian’s conception, when he represents it as substantially the same as that of Valentinus, differing only in the number of emanations acknowledged- because, as Hippolytus certifies, the Valentinians “acknowledge that the one is the originator of all” and “the whole goes back to one.” Nor does he improve matters when he adds in a note that ” according to these doctrines, the unity is sufficiently preserved (1) if the several persons have one and the same substance, (2) if there is one possessor of the whole substance, i.e., if everything proceeds from him.” Tertullian, on the contrary, is never weary of asseverating that his doctrine of unity demands much more than this - not merely that it is out of the one God that all proceeds - nor merely that what thus comes forth from God is of His substance, so that all of the emanations are of the substance of God - but specifically that this going forth from God of His prolations is merely an extension of the Godhead, not a division from it. Thus the unity, he says, is preserved through the prolations; and no separation from God is instituted by the prolations. These abide unbrokenly “portions” of the deity, not fragments broken off from the deity. Nor is Harnack much happier when he goes on 120 to say that Tertullian conceived God up to the prolation of the Logos ” as yet … the only person.” According to his explicit exposition of the life of God in eternity, Tertullian held that there never was a time when God was alone, except in the sense that there was no created universe about Him: in the beginning 118 Chap. viii. 119 ii. p. 258. 120 ii. p. 259.

itself that Reason which the common people, simply translating the Greek of John’s Gospel, call the Word, was with Him, though within Him, as Another. Thus in the unity of the Godhead there always was a distinction of persons, even before, by the prolations of Son and Spirit, this distinction was manifested ad extra.

The distinctions of persons in the Godhead, accordingly, as Tertullian conceived them, were not created by the prolations of Son and Spirit. These prolations merely brought into manifestation the distinctions of persons already existing in the Godhead. Neither did he suppose that these distinctions would cease on the recession of these prolations back into the Godhead - as Tertullian anticipates will take place when their end is served. It is the prolations, not the personal distinctions, which in his thought have a beginning and ending; and when he teaches that these prolations come forth at the Father’s will, fulfill their purpose and retire back into the Godhead, this cannot in any way affect his doctrine either of the unity of God or of the Trinity in the unity. In all this process, rather, he is tracing out only an incident in the life of God, a temporary outfl.owing of God to do a specific work. The whole exposition which Harnack gives of this transaction is colored by misapprehension of Tertullian’s import. It is indeed more infelicitous than even this circumstance would indicate. No doubt Tertullian’s subordinationism is very marked. Though he conceives the prolate Logos and the Spirit as truly God, they are, in his view, God at the periphery of His being, going forth, in a certain reduction of deity, for the world-work.121 But to speak of even the prolate Logos as a “Being which must be a d~rived existence, which has already in some fashion a finite element in itself, because it is the hypostatized Word of creation, which has an origin ”; and to add, ” From the standpoint of humanity this deity is God Himself, i.e., a God whom men can apprehend and who can apprehend them, but from God’s standpoint, which speculation can fix but not fathom, this deity is a subordinate, nay, even a temporary one” -is to go beyond all warrant discoverable in Tertullian’s exposition. It is of the very essence of Tertullian’s thought that there was no “finite element ” in the Logos, or in the Spirit which constitutes the third in the Godhead - ” as the fruit of the tree is third from the root, or as the stream out of the river is third from the fountain, or as the apex of the ray is third from the sun ”; 122 that these prolations are, in a word, nothing but God Himself extended for the performance of a worknothing, if the simile can be allowed, but the hand of God stretched out for the task of bringing a world into existence and guiding its course to its destined end. As such the Logos mediated between God and the world; but to make Tertullian teach, to use words of Bull’s,128 that ” the very nature of the Son in itself is a mean between God and the creatures,” that is to say, is something distinguishable alike from the supreme nature of God on the one side, and from the rest of created beings on the other - is to confound his whole conception. He not only did not teach that the Logos is a creature of nature different from that of God, of a derived existence, having an absolute origin, and destined to reach an end: but he explicitly teaches the contradictory of these things. The Logos existed eternally, he asseverates, in God: the prolation of the Logos, indeed, had a beginning and will have an end; but the Logos Himself who is prolated, is so far from being a derived existence, which has a finite element in it, and has an origin and is to make an end - that He is just God Himself prolated, that is, outstretched like a hand, to His work. And what is true of the Logos is true of the Spirit. He is not, as the Arians imagined, the creature of a creature, but just the still further prolated God - the tips of the fingers of the hand of God.124 Almighty, in that He is the Word of God Almighty.” Again,128 ”’ All things,’ saith He,’ are delivered unto Me of the Father.’ … The Creator hath delivered all things to Him who is not less than Himself, - to the Son: all things, to wit, which He created by Him, i.e., by His own Word.” Accordingly, Tertullian does not hesitate to speak of the Son as God or to attribute to Him all that is true of God. He does not scruple, for example, to apply Rom. ix. 5 to Him - affirming Him in the words of that text to be God over all, blessed for ever.129 If it be asked how Tertullian made this recognition of the full equality of the Son with the Father consistent with the subordinationism which he had taken over from the Apologists along with their Logos Christology, the answer appears to turn on the identification of the Son with the prolate Logos. The strong subordination of the Son belongs to Him as prolated, not specifically as second in the Godhead. ” It will therefore follow,” says Tertullian in an illuminating passage,180 “that by Him who is invisible, we must understand the Father in the fullness of His majesty, while we recognize the Son as visible by reason of the dispensation of His derived existence (pro modulo derivationis); even as it is not permitted us to contemplate the sun in the full amount of his substance which is in the heavens, but we can only endure with our eyes a ray by reason of the tempered condition of this portion which is projected from him to the earth… . We declare, however, that the Son also, considered in Himself, . ” . is invisible, in that He is God, and the Word, and Spirit of God.” In this passage it is affirmed that in Himself, because He is God, the Son shares all the qualities of God, and becomes “reduced God,” if we can be allowed such a phrase, only pro modulo derivationis, that is to say, as the result of the prolation by , virtue of which He is extended outwards for the purpose of action in and on the world. This passage will aid us also in apprehending how we are to understand Tertullian when he speaks of the Son as a ” portion ” only of the Godhead. Again it is, of course, only as prolate Logos that He is so spoken of: and as prolate Logos He is conceived under the figure of the ray which as a ” portion ” of the sun is ” tempered ” to the eyes of men. Similarly the prolate Logos is a “portion” of the Godhead, that is to say, not a separated part or even a particular part of the Godhead, but the Godhead itself “tempered ” for its mission relatively to the world. This ” portion ” is not to be conceived, then, as a fragment of Godhead; it is in and of itself all that God is. Tertullian not only distinctly affirms this on all occasions, but expressly explains that it is neither separated from the Godhead nor in anything less than it, but is “equal to the Father, and has and possesses all that the Father has.” 131 Nay, Tertullian tells us with crisp directness that this ” portio ” of the Godhead is Itself ” consort in Its fullness ” (plenitudinis consors). ” If you do not deny,” he argues with Marcion,132 ” that the Creator’s Son and Spirit and Substance is also His Christ, you must needs allow that those who have not acknowledged the Father have likewise failed to acknowledge the Son, seeing that they share the same substance (per ejusdam substantice conditionem) : for if It baffled men’s understanding in Its Plenitude, much more has a portion of It, especially since It is consort in the Plenitude.” 133 It cannot surprise us, therefore, when we observe Tertullian representing a distinctive way of designating our Lord· as in part due merely to a desire to be clear and to avoid confusion in language. He is speaking 134 of the habit of distinguishing between God the Father and the Son by calling the former God and the latter Lord. There is no foundation for the distinction, he tells us, in the nature of things. Any one of the persons of the Godhead may with equal propriety be called either God or Lord. He ” definitely declares that two are God, the Father and the Son, and with the addition of the Holy Spirit, even three, according to the principle of the divine o1KoJ1oµta, which introduces number.” He will never say, however, that there are two Gods or two Lords, yet ” not as if,” he explains, “it were untrue that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and each is God.” This apparently can only mean that the three are all together the one God - and, indeed, one of his characteristic phrases is the famous deus ambo or even tres.135 But though Christ is thus rightly called God, it is best, he thinks, in order to avoid mistakes, to speak of Him as Lord when the Father is mentioned at the same time, and to call Him God only when He is mentioned alone. For there is no gradation in the Godhead, as Tertullian elsewhere remarks,186 although there are three ” grades” in the Godhead: which is as much as to say that considered in themselves, those who are distinguished as first, second, and third- that is to say, in the modes of their existence as source and prolations of the first and second order - are yet consorts in the plenitude of God.137 On this basis Tertullian, in developing his doctrine of the person of Christ in the formula of ” Deus homo, unus Christus,” could strenuously insist on the complete deity as well as perfect humanity of this one divine-human person. And in this insistence we may find the culminating proof that he sought to do full justice to the true deity of Christ. He approaches this subject 138 in the course of a confutation of the Monarchian attempt to find a distinction between Father and Son by understanding the Father to be the divine Spirit incarnated and the Son to be the incarnating flesh. Thus, says Tertullian, while contending that the Father and Son are one and the same, they do, in fact, divide them and so fall into the hands of the Valentinians, making Jesus, the man, and Christ, the inhabiting Spirit, two. Proceeding to expound the true relation between the incarnated Spirit and the incarnating flesh, he next argues that the process of incarnation was not that of a transformation of the divine Spirit into flesh, because God neither ceases to be what He was nor can He be any other thing than what He is. Accordingly when the Word became flesh, this was accomplished not by His becoming transmuted into flesh but by His clothing Himself with flesh. No less is it insupposable, he argues, that the incarnation was accomplished by any mixture of the two substances, divine Spirit and flesh, forming a third substance intermediate between the two.139 At that rate Jesus would have ceased to be God while not becoming man: whereas the Scriptures represent Him to have been both God and man. Accordingly we must believe that there was no confusion of the two in the person of Jesus, but such a conjunction of God and man that, the property of each nature being wholly preserved, the divine nature continued to do all things suitable to itself, while the human nature, on the other hand, exhibited all the affections that belong to it. Jesus, thus, was in one these two - man of the flesh, God of the Spirit: and in Him coexist two substances, viz., the divine and the human,140 the one of which is immortal and the other mortal. Throughout this whole discussion the integrity of the divine nature - immortal, impassible, unchangeable - is carefully preserved and its union in the one person Jesus Christ with a human nature, mortal, passible, capable of change, is so explained as to preserve it from all confusion, intermixture or interchange with it. We could not have a clearer exhibition of Tertullian’s zeal to do full justice to the true deity of Christ.

While we cannot say with Harnack 141 that Tertullian exhibits no trace of independent interest in the doctrine of the Spirit, it is yet true that he speaks much less fully and much less frequently of Him than of the Logos,142 and that his doctrine of the Spirit runs quite parallel with that of the Logos. He has spoken of Him, moreover, ordinarily in connections where the doctrine of the Logos is also under discussion and therefore his modes of thought on this branch of the subject have already been perhaps sufficiently illustrated. Tdistinct personality of the Spirit is as clearly acknowledged as g o s Himself. In the oLKovoµla the unity is distributed not into a duality, but into a trinity, providing a place not for two only but for three - the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; who differ from one another not in condition, substance, or power but in degree, form, and ~ .143 And everywhere the third person is treated as just as distinct a personality as the second and first. There is no clear passage carrying this distinct personality back into eternity. That Tertullian thought of the personality of the Spirit precisely as he did of that of the Logos is here our only safe guide. On the other hand, there is no lack of passages in which the unity of substance is insisted upon relatively to the Spirit also.144 After explaining that the substance of the Son is just the substance of the Father, he adds: “The same remark is made by me with respect to the third degree, because I believe the Spirit to be from no other source than from the Father through the Son.” 145 So~ n : ” The Sp-irit-ts··the- third frnm…God 3Ild—ttm··s-on,-as-the fruit from the tree is the third from the root, and the stream from the river is third from the fountain, and the apex from the ray is third from the sun. Nothing, however, is separated from the matrix from which it draws its properties; and thus, the Trinity flows down from the Father through consertos et conexos gradus and in no respects injures the monarchy while protecting the economy.” 146 On this view the true deity of the Spirit is emphasized as fully as that of the Logos, and Tertullian repeatedly speaks of Him likewise shortly as God,147 as ” the Third Name in the Godhead and the Third Degree of the Divine Majesty.” 148 Accordingly when he “definitely declares that two are God, the Father and the Son,” he adds,148 “and with the addition of the Holy Ghost, even three, according to the principle of the divine economy, which introduces number, in order that the Father may not, as you perversely infer, be believed to have Himself been born, and to have suffered.” To Tertullian, therefore, the alternative was not the complete deity of the Spirit or His creaturehood; but the unity of Monarchianism or the Trinity in the unity of the economy. He never thinks of mee.tic.g the Monarchian assault by denying the full deity of the Spirit, but only by providing a distinction of persons within the unity of the Godhead. The most instructive passages are naturally those in which all three persons are brought .together, of which there are a considerable number.150 To quote but one of these, he explains that “the connection of the Father in the Son, and of the Son in the Paraclete, produces three coherent Persons, [distinct, nevertheless] one from the other: these three are one substance, [unum], not one person, [unus], as it is said, ’ I and my Father are one [unum],’ in respect of unity of substance not singularity of number.” 151 There can, in short, be no question that Tertullian had applied to the Spirit with full consciousness all that he had thought out concerning the Son, and that His doctrine of God was fully settled into a doctrine of Trinity. His mode of speaking of the Spirit introduces no new difficulty in construing his doctrine - which is something that cannot be said of all his predecessors.

By such expositions as these, Tertullian appears, in seeking to do justice to the elements of doctrine embalmed in the Rule of Faith, fairly to pass beyond the natural reach of the Logos speculation and to open the way to a higher conception. A symbol of this advance may not unfairly be discovered in the frequent appearance in his pages of the new term “Trinity.” The Greek equivalent of this term occurs in his contemporary Hippolytus,152 but scarcely elsewhere, at this early date, to designate the distinctions in the Godhead - unless indeed we account the single instance of its employment by Theophilus of Antioch a preparation for such an application of it.158 In any event, there is a fine appropriateness in the sudden apparition of the term in easy and frequent use,154 for the first time, in the pages of an author whose discussions make so decided an approximation toward the enunciation of that doctrine to denote which this term was so soon to become exclusively consecrated. The insistence of Tertullian upon the oiKovoµla in the monarchy- on unity of substance, with all that is implied in unity of substance, persisting in three distinct persons who coexist from eternity - certainly marks out the lines within which the developed doctrine of the Trinity moves, and deserves to be signalized by the emergence into literature of the term by which the developed doctrine of the Trinity should ever afterward be designated.

It is possible that something of the same symbolical significance may attach also to Tertullian’s use of his favorite term olKovoµla. Of course, oiKovoµla is not a new word; but it is used by Tertullian in an unwonted sense - a sense scarcely found elsewhere except in his contemporary Hippolytus,155 and, perhaps as a kind of preparation for their use of it, in a single passage of T a t i an . 1 9 Tertullian constantly employs it, as we G have seen, to designate, as over against the monarchy, the mystery of the Trinity in the unity. There can be no question of its general implication in his pages; but it is, no doubt, a little difficult to determine the precise significance of the term itself which he employs. The fundamental sense of the word is ” disposition”; but in its application it receives its form either from the idea of “administration,” or from that of ” structure.” If it is used by Tertullian in the former shade of meaning, its employment by him need not have great significance for his Trinitarian doctrine. He would, in that case, only say by it that the monarchy of God is administered by a disposition of the Godhead into three several personalities, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, through whom the single Lordship is carried on, as it were, by deputy; while the precise relation of these personalities to one another and to the Godhead itself would be left to the context to discover.

An argument which occurs in the third chapter of the tract, “Against Praxeas,” seems to many to suggest that it was in this sense that the term was employed by Tertullian. Tertullian here explains that ” monarchy has no other meaning than single and unique rule ”; “but for all that,” he adds, “this monarchy does not preclude him whose government it is …

from administering his own monarchy by whatever agents he will ”: and much less can the integrity of a monarchy suffer by the association in it of a Son, since it is still held in common by two who are so really one (tam unicis). Applying these general principles to the monarchy of God, he argues that this monarchy is therefore by no means set aside by the circumstance that it is administered by means of legions and hosts of angels ”; and much less can it be thought to be injured by the participation in it of the Son and Holy Spirit, to whom the second and third places are assigned, but who are inseparably joined with the Father, in His substance. “Do you really suppose,” he asks, “that those who are naturally members of the Father’s own substance, His congeners,167 instruments of His might, nay, His power itself, and the entire system of His monarchy, are the overthrow and destruction thereof? ” It seems tolerably clear that Tertullian is not here comparing the economy with the administrative agents of a monarchy: with them he rather compares the hosts of angels through whom the divine monarchy is administered. The economy is rather compared to the sharing of the monarchy itself between father and son as co-regents on a single throne. In that case, so far is economy on his lips from bearing the sense of administration that it is expressly distinguished from it, and referred to something in the Godhead deeper than its administrative functions. The illustration, therefore, emphasizes, indeed, the personal distinctions of the economy- they are comparable to the distinction between father and son in a conjoint rule - but it suggests equally the penetration of this distinction behind all matters of administration into the Godhead, the Ruling Being, itself.

Nor is this impression set aside by the implication of the other figures employed by Tertullian to explain the relations of the persons in the Godhead. When he compares them to the root, the tree, and the fruit, or to the fountain, the river, and the stream, or to the sun, the ray, and the apex, his mind seems undoubtedly to be upon the prolated Logos and Spirit; these figures indeed, so constantly upon his lips, seem inapplicable to eternal distinctions, lying behind the prolations. But it must be remembered, first, that these illustrations are not original with Tertullian, but are taken over by him from the Apologists along with their Logos speculation - although they are doubtless developed and given new point by him; next, that the precise point which he adduces them to illustrate is not the whole import of the economy, but the preservation of the unity of substance within the economy of three persons; and finally, that the ordinary engagement of his mind with the Trinity of Persons, in what we may call its developed form - its mode of manifestation in God acting ad extra - need not by any means exclude from his thought a recognition of an ontological basis, in the structure of the Godhead itself, for this manifested Trinity. And if in one passage he presses his illustrations to the verge of suggesting a separation of the Son from the Father - intimating that the Son may be affected by the sufferings of the God-man while the Father remains in impassible blessedness; 158 in another, on the other hand, he seems expressly to carry back the distinction of persons into the eternal Godhead itself - affirming that God was never ” alone ” save in the sense of independence of all external existence, but there was always with Him, because in Him, that other self which afterward proceeded from Him for the making of the world.159 The fullest recognition, therefore, that Tertullian habitually thought of the Trinity in, so to speak, its developed form - with the Logos and the Spirit prolate and working in the world - by no means precludes the possibility that the very term olKovoµla connoted in his hands something more fundamental than a distinction in the Godhead constituted by these prolations.

And certainly the word was currently employed in senses that lent it a color which may very well have given it to Tertullian the deeper connotation of internal structure, when he applied it to the Godhead. To perceive this, we have only to recall its application to express the proper adjustment of the parts of a building, as Vitruvius, for example, uses it,160 or to express what we call the disposition, that is the plan or construction of a literary composition, as it is used, say, by Cicero, when he speaks of the ol,wvoµla perturbatior of his letter,161 or by Quintilian,162 when he ascribes to the old Latin comedies a better olKovoµla than the new exhibited.163 A very interesting instance of the employment of the word in this sense of ” structure” occurs in the Letter of the Church of Smyrna, giving an account of the martyrdom of Polycarp.164 The martyrs were so torn by the scourge, says this passage, that ” the olKovoµla of their flesh was visible even so far as the inward veins and arteries.” Lightfoot translates here, “the internal structure and mechanism,” and refers us to Eusebius’ paraphrase, which tells us the martyrs were so lacerated that “the hidden inward parts of the body, both their bowels and their members, were exposed to view.” 165 There can be no doubt that this very common usage of the term was well known to Tertullian the rhetorician, and it may very well be that when he adopted it to express the distribution of the Godhead into three persons it was because it suggested to him rather the inner structure, so to speak, of the Godhead itself, than merely an external arrangement for the administration of the divine dominion.

That Tertullian’s usage of the term implies as much as this is recognized, indeed, by the most of those who have busied themselves with working out the interesting history of this word in the usage of the Fathers.166 Dr. W. Gass, for example, sion 4, p. 160, where a number of examples are given. See also Lightfoot, on Eph. i. 10, and the Lexicons.

after tracing the word up to Tertullian and finding it employed up to that point to express ” the outward-going revelatory activity of God, whether creative and organizing or redemptive,” u,7 remarks upon the sudden change that meets us in Tertullian. “It has been justly thought remarkable,” he continues, “that this same expression is applied by Tertullian to the inner relations of the Godhead itself. He employs ’ economy ’ as an indispensable organon of the Christian knowledge of God, in his controversy with Praxeas.” Then, after quoting the passages in the” Against Praxeas,” chaps. ii.

and iii., he proceeds: ” Monarchy and economy are therefore the two interests on the combination an.d proper balancing of which the Trinitarian conception of God depends; by the former the unity of the divine rule, by the latter the right of an immanent distinction is established, and it is only necessary that the latter principle should not be pressed so far as to do violence to the former.” Without laying too much stress on so nice a point, it would seem not unnatural therefore to look upon Tertullian’s predilection for the term olKoiioµlo. as, like his usage of the term Trinitas, symptomatic of his tendency to take a deeper view of the Trinitarian relation than that which has in later times come to be spoken of as ” merely economical.”

We derive thus from our study of Tertullian’s modes of statement a rather distinct impression that there is discoverable in them an advance toward the conception of an immanent Trinity. The question becomes at once in a new degree pressing how far this advance is to be credited to Tertullian himself, and how far it represents only modes of thought and even forms of statement current in the Christianity of his ternal revelations of God,” ” the internal distributions of the original unitary Godhead into a purely divine and a finite substance, and the division of the latter into a graded plurality of beings which make up the pleroma ” - which last is the Gnostic way of expressing it.

time, which push themselves to observation in his writings only because he chances to be dealing with themes which invite a rather fuller expression than ordinary of this side of the faith of Christians. We shall return to this question in the Third Article.

THIRD ARTICLE 168 IN the First and Second Articles it has been pointed out that there is discoverable in Tertullian’s modes of statement a rather distinct advance towards the conception of an immanent Trinity. We wish now to inquire how far this advance is to be credited to Tertullian himself, and how far it represents modes of thought and forms of statement current in his time, and particularly observable in Tertullian only because he chances to be dealing with themes which invited a fuller expression than ordinary of this side of the faith of Christians. We have already seen that there is a large traditional element in Tertullian’s teaching; that even the terms, ” Trinity” and” Economy,” in which his doctrine of the distinctions within the Godhead is enshrined, are obviously used by him as old and well-known terms; and that he betrays no consciousness of enunciating new conceptions in his development of his doctrine, but rather writes like a man who is opposing old truth to new error. Indeed he openly asserts that this is the case. If we are to take his own point of view in the matter, we cannot hesitate to assert, then, that he has himself made no advance, but is simply enforcing the common Christian faith against the innovations of destructive heresy. Of course this common Christian faith, which he is zealous thus to enforce, is fundamentally the Rule of Faith. But it can scarcely be denied that it is more than this; Tertullian’s own view clearly is that his expositions embody also the common understanding of the Rule of Faith. He is not consciously offering any novel constructions of it, or building up on his own account a higher structure upon it. No doubt he is doing his best to state the common faith clearly and forcibly, and to apply its elements tellingly in the controversy in which he was engaged; and he may certainly in so doing have clarified it, and even filled it with new significance, not to say developed from it hitherto unsuspected implications. How far, however, this can be affirmed of him can be determined only by some survey of the modes of thought and statement of his predecessors and contemporaries who have dealt with the same doctrines. What first strikes us when we turn to the Apologists with this end in view is that most of Tertullian’s modes of statement can be turned up, in one place or another, in the Apologetic literature. We say ” in one place or another ” advisedly, for the peculiarity of the case is that they do not all appear in the pages of a single writer, but scattered through the writings of all. Thus if the term rplas appears in Theophilus, it is in Tatian that the term olKoPoµ[a meets us in a sense similar to that in which Tertullian uses it. If Athanagoras seems to struggle to carry back the divine relationships into eternity,100 and Theophilus by the use of the distinction between the M’YoS iPotaOeros and the hO”fOS 1rpoopLKOs at least seeks a basis for the distinction of God and His Logos prior to the prolation of the Logos, Justin leaves us uncertain whether he thought of the Logos as having any sort of being before the moment of His begetting. The simile by which the relation of the Logos to God is compared to the relation of the light to the sun is already found in Justin: but it is to Tatian that we must go to discover such a careful exposition of the relation of the Logos to God as the following: “He came into being by way of impartation ( Kara µepu1µ0P) not of abscission (Kara 6.:1r0Ko1r~P); for what is cut off is separated from the primitive (rov 1rpwrov), but what is imparted, receiving its share of the Economy,170 does not make him from whom it is taken deficient.” 171 The result is that while we could from fragments, derived this from one and that from another of the Apologists, piece together a statement of doctrine which would assimilate itself to Tertullian’s, we could verify this statement from no one of the Apologists, but, on the contrary, elements of it would be more or less sharply contradicted by one or another of them. There are, in other words, hints scattered through the Apologists that men were already reaching out toward the forms of statement that meet us in Tertullian, but only in him are these hints brought together. We assent, therefore, when Harnack 112 says: “We cannot at bottom say that the Apologists possessed a doctrine of the Trinity.” Only we must in this statement emphasize both the terms “at bottom” and ” doctrine.” There are everywhere discoverable in the Apologists suggestions of a Trinitarian mode of thought: but these are not brought together into a formulated doctrine which governed their thinking of the being of God.

The phenomena are such, in one word, as to force us to perceive in the writings of the Apologists - as has been widely recognized by students of their works - a double deposit of conceptions relative to the mode of the divine existence. There is their own philosophical construction, which is, briefly, the Logos speculation. And underlying that, there is the Christian tradition - to which they desired to be faithful and which was ever intruding into their consciousness and forcing from them acknowledgment of elements of truth which formed no part of their philosophical confession of faith. This divided character of the Apologetic mind is by no one more clearly expounded than by the late Dr. Purves in his lectures on “The Testimony of Justin Martyr to Early Christianity.”

Justin was, as Harnack remarks,173 “the most Christian among the plurality in the unity, causes no loss to that from which it comes.” BethuneBaker (p. 126) renders: “Receiving as its function one of administration,” and explains: ” The part of o1,wvoµlo., administration of the world, revelation.” the Apologists,” and this feature in his dealing with doctrine is perhaps especially marked in him: but it is shared also by all his congeners. Dr. Purves fully recognizes that Justin was, in his thinking about God, first of all the philosopher: and that his “own thought strongly tended away from the doctrine of a Trinity ” m - toward a sort of ditheism which embraced a doctrine of “the consubstantiality of the Logos and the Father of all.” And yet there crops up repeatedly in his writings testimony to the worship by the Christians of three divine persons. This testimony is particularly remarkable with reference to the Spirit. For ” his own theology had really no place for the Spirit,” and yet “Justin speaks of the Spirit as not only an object of worship but as the power of Christian life.” “Thus Justin,” concludes Dr. Purves,m “in spite of himself testifies to the threefold object of Christian worship. He even finds in Plato an adumbration of the first, second and third powers in the universe, though in doing so he misunderstands and misinterprets that philosopher. Justin’s own conception is vague, or, when not vague, unscriptural in certain important points… . But … he … effectively testifies to the traditional faith of the Church in the Father, Son, and Spirit as the threefold object of Christian worship, and the threefold source of Christian life.” What was true of Justin was true, each in his measure, of the other Apologists. “Two conceptions of Deity were struggling with each other ” 116 in their minds. Dominated by their philosophical inheritance, they could only imperfectly assimilate the Christian revelation, which therefore made itself felt only in spots and patches in their teaching. What was needed that the Christian doctrine of God should come to its rights was some change in the conditions governing the conceptions of the leaders of Christian thinking by which they might measurably be freed from the philosophical bondage in which they were holden. The appearance of juster views precisely in the expositions of Tertullian would seem thus to be connected ultimately with a certain shifting of interest manifested in Tertullian as compared with the Apologists. The Apologists were absorbed largely in the cosmological aspects of Christian doctrine.177 In Tertullian these retire into the background and the soteriological interest comes markedly forward. In their cosmological speculations, the Apologists, for example, scarcely felt the need of a Holy Spirit; all that they had clamantly in mind to provide for, they conceived of as the natural function of the Logos. Their recognition of the Holy Spirit was therefore largely conventional and due to allegiance to the Christian tradition. A new point of view has been attained when Tertullian, out of his soteriological interest, thinks of the Spirit profoundly as the sanctifier of men, the II vicarious power ” of the Logos for applying His redemptive work. This shifting of interest inevitably led to a new emphasis on the distinctive personalities of the three persons of the deity, and to their separation from the world-process that justice might be done to their perfect deity as the authors - each in his appropriate sphere- of salvation.178 It is instructive that in his “Apology,” addressed like the chief works of the Apologists to the heathen, Tertullian still moves, like them, largely within the cosmological sphere: whereas in his tract, ” Against Praxeas,” addressed to fellow-Christians, the soteriological point of view comes more to its right. And it is equally instructive that among preceding writers it is in Irenreus who, with emphasis, eschewed philosophy and sought to build up a specifically Biblical doctrine, that we find forms of statement concerning the three persons whom Christians worshiped as the one God most nearly approaching the construction adumbrated by Tertullian. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the supplanting among Christian thinkers of the Logos speculation by a doctrine of immanent Trinity was largely mediated by the shifting of interest from the cosmological to the soteriological aspect of Christian truth, and that in Tertullian we see for the first time clearly marked the beginning of the process by which this change was wrought.

This suggestion receives notable support from a comparison of Tertullian’s modes of statement with those of his contemporary Hippolytus, in his treatise, “Against Noetus ” - a treatise which, as it arose out of conditions remarkably like those which called out Tertullian’s tract, “Against Praxeas,” contains so much that is similar to what we find in that tract that it is hard to shake ourselves entirely free from the illusion that one borrows from the other. Hippolytus’ relation as a pupil to Iremeus,179 whose language in regard to the Trinitarian relationships approaches that of Tertullian most nearly of all previous writers, and from whom Tertullian himself frankly draws, is doubtless another factor of importance in accounting for the resemblance between the two tracts. But as we have already suggested, we are persuaded that this resemblance, so far as it is real, is mainly due to the fact that Tertullian and Hippolytus, alike heirs of the Logos-speculation, and alike determined to do justice to the deposit of truth in the Rule of Faith, were alike called upon in the new conditions of the early third century to uphold the common faith of Christendom against the subtlest form of the Monarchian attack. If this be true, nothing could hold out a better promise of enabling us to discriminate in Tertullian’s statements the traditional element from his personal contribution than a comparison of them with those of Hippolytus.

The first thing that strikes us in attempting such a comparison is the extent of the common element in the two. We meet in Hippolytus the same terminology which we have found in Tertullian. He, too, employs the term Trinity; 180 and, as well, Tertullian’s favorite term, “the Economy” 181 - although perhaps not with the same profundity of meaning; even Tertullian’s phrase, ” the mystery of the economy.” 182 We almost feel ourselves still on Tertullian’s ground when we read in Hippolytus: ” For who will not say that there is one God? Yet he will not on that account deny the Economy.” 188 This feeling is increased by the occurrence in Hippolytus of similar illustrations of the relations of the Logos to the primal Godhead. “But when I say another,” he remarks, ” I do not mean that there are two Gods, but that it is only as light of light, or as water from a fountain, or as a ray from the sun.” 184 Even the same proof-texts are employed in the same manner. Thus the declaration in Jno. x. 30, “I and the Father are one,” is treated quite in Tertullian’s manner. “Understand that He did not say, ’ I and the Father am one, but are one.’ For the word are is not said of one person, but it refers to two persons, and one power.” 185 So again, like Tertullian, Hippolytus insists strongly on the true deity of Christ and supports it after much the same fashion. He calls Him ” God,” 186 ” the Almighty,” 187 appeals just like Tertullian to Mt. xi. 27, and like Tertullian even applies to Him the great text, Rom. ix. 5, commenting: ” He who is over all, God blessed, has been born; and having been made man, He is God for ever.” 188 His doctrine of the Person of Christ, moreover, is indistinguishable from Tertullian’s. “Let us believe, then, dear brethren,” he says, ” according to the tradition of the apostles, that God the Word came down from heaven, into the holy Virgin Mary, in order that, taking the flesh from her, and assuming also a human, by which I mean a rational soul, and becoming thus all that man is with the exception of sin, he … was manifested as God in a body, coming forth too as a perfect man. For it was not in mere appearance or by conversion, but in truth, that He became man.” 189 Underlying and sustaining all these detailed resemblances, moreover, is the great fundamental likeness between the two writers arising from their common application of the Logos speculation to the facts of the Christian tradition, and their common opposition to the Monarchian heresy.

With a little closer scrutiny, however, marked differences between the two writers begin to develop.

In the first place, we observe that Hippolytus does not very well know what to do with the Holy Spirit. He repeats the triune formula with great emphasis: ” We cannot otherwise think of one God,” he says, “but by believing in truth in Father and Son and Holy Spirit.” ” The Economy of agreement is gathered up into one God: for God is One: for He who commands is the Father, and He who obeys is the Son, and that which teaches wisdom is the Spirit.” 190 ” We accordingly see the Word incarnate, and through Him we know the Father, and believe in the Son and worship the Holy Ghost.” 191 He manifestly desires to be led in all things by the Scriptural revelation: from no other quarter, he declares, than the oracles of God will he derive instruction in such things, and therefore as they declare to us what the Father wills us to believe, that will he believe, and as He wills the Son to be glorified, so will he glorify Him, and as He wills the Holy Spirit to be bestowed, so will he receive Him.192 Nevertheless it is quite clear that he can hardly assimilate the Biblical doctrine of the Spirit, and when he comes to speak out his mind upon Him, he makes it apparent that he does not at all think of Him as a person. It is curious to observe, indeed, the circumlocutions he employs to avoid calling Him a person. ” I shall not indeed say there are two Gods, but one; two persons, however, while the third economy is the grace of the Holy Spirit. For the Father indeed is one, but there are two persons, because there is the Son also: and then there is the third, the Holy Spirit.” 198 From a passage like this, Hippolytus’ fundamental thought would seem to have been, like Justin’s, a kind of ditheism, somewhat violently transformed into a tritheism under the pressure of the traditional faith.

When we look further we perceive that even this ditheism is far from pure. We observe a notable e:ffort to avoid that clear assertion of substantial unity of the Father and Son which constitutes the very core of Tertullian’s doctrine. When the declaration of our Lord in Jno. x. 30, ” I and the Father are one,” is quoted,194 Hippolytus’ exposition is: “It refers to two persons and one ” - not substance, as Tertullian would have said, but - ” power.” And then Hippolytus calls in illustratively Jno. xvii. 22, 23, where our Lord expresses His desire that His disciples may be one, even as He and the Father are one, and asks triumphantly, “Are all [the disciples] one body in respect of substance, or is it that we become one in the power and disposition of likemindedness?” 195 “In the same manner” - thus he applies the illustration - ” the Son … confessed that He was in the Father in power and disposition.” This view of the unity of Father and Son as consisting in unity in mind and power only is consistently preserved throughout; 196 and the revelatory character of the Son is in harmony with this hung, not on His identity with God, but on His character as the image of God.101 Accordingly, we discover that the Logos is not thought by Hippolytus to have been eternally with God, but is assigned an absolute beginning at a definite point of time previous to the creation of the world. Like Tertullian, he tells us that God subsisted from all eternity alone, having nothing contemporaneous with Himself. But he does not, like Tertullian, tell us that though thus existing alone, so far as things external to Himself are concerned, there was within Him another, His fellow, His eternal Word, a second to Him. Quite di:fferently, he tells us that though alone, He was many- a plurality.198 And then he goes on to explain that this means that God was never ” reasonless, or wisdomless, or powerless, or counselless, but all things were in Him and He was the all.” 199 In other words, it is not of a personal Logos as the eternal Companion that Hippolytus is thinking, but of the ideal world, the Kbuµos vo ‘Y}rbs, as constituting an eternal “plurality ” of God. Accordingly when in another place 200 he is again describing the origin of the Logos, the eternal existence which he attributes to Him is not an existence as a personal Logos, but only as the ” indwelling rationality of the universe.” The Logos thus for Hippolytus exists from all eternity only ideally. From this ideal existence He came into real existence for the first time when God, intending to create the world, begat Him ” as the Author and Fellow-Counsellor and Framer of the things that are in formation,” 201 and “thus,” says Hippolytus,202 ” there appeared another beside Him ” - thus and then only. Here it must be remarked is a doctrine of the absolute origination of the Logos by the will of the Father, so that the Logos appears distinctly as a creature of the Father’s wm.203 Nor does Hippolytus in the least shrink from this conception. When explaining that Adam was made a man with the characteristics and limitations of a man, not by inadvertence or because of any limitation of power on God’s part, but by design, he says: “The Creator did not wish to make him a God and failed in His aim; nor an angel - be not deceived - but a man. For if He had wished to make thee a God He could have done so: you have the example of the Logos.” 20 To Hip- 4, polytus, therefore, the Logos is distinctly a created God, whom God made a God because, shortly, He chose to do so. He has indeed preeminence above all other creatures, not only because He was made a God and they were not, but also because He alone of creatures was made by God Himself while all other creatures were made by Him the Logos; and because they all were made out of nothing, while “Him alone God produced from existing things ( El; 5vrwv) ,” and, as God alone existed, that means from His own substance.205 The Logos is therefore only in this sense of the substance of God, that He was framed retain the Logos in Himself or permit Him to proceed out, as He wills. He even speaks once of the Logos himself as a product of the divine will (chap. 13; cf. chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11) .” For the fundamental significance of this see above, p. 32 note 45, and the references there given. Natural as this stress on the voluntariness of the divine action, even in the prolation of the Logos, was on the lips of the Apologists in protest against the natural processes of emanation taught by the Gnostics, there underlay it in its application to the prolation of the Logos a view of the relation of the Logos to the Father which scarcely did justice to the real state of the case, and was near to a conception of the Logos as absolutely originating in this act of the divine will, and hence as of creaturely character. This point of view was that of some of the Apologists, and was revived by the Arians. In opposition to it the Nicene Fathers (Athanasius, “Or. cont. Ar.,” III. xxx.; “De Decret. Nie. Syn.”; Ambrose,” De Fide Chr.,” iv. 9) learned to go behind the will of God in the generation of the Logos. There is a sense, of course, in which, as Dollinger points out (” Hippolytus and Callistus,” E.T. p. 198), God as voluntary subject does all He does voluntarily; but after all said and done as the Arian contention that the Son owed His being to an act of will on the part of the Father was meant to imply that the Son was a creature, this mode of speech is Arian in tendency and it is best frankly to say -taking will in its natural sense-that the act of eternal generation is not an act of will but a necessary movement in the divine being. (Cf. Dorner, op. cit., Div. I. vol. ii. p. 460.)

out of the divine substance; although what the process was by which God thus” begat Hirn as He willed,” Hippolytus declines to inquire as too mysterious for human investigation.206 He has no hesitation, however, in speaking of him as a creature who came into existence at a definite time, is only what His maker willed, and is God and possessor of the power of God and therefore almighty only by gift and not by nature.201 It is not necessary to pursue this inquiry further. Enough has been brought out to show that Hippolytus’ Trinity consisted in a transcendent God who produced at a definite point of time a secondary divinity called the Logos, to whom He subjected all things; and along with these a third something not very definitely conceived, called by the Church the Holy Spirit. Here is not one God in three persons; here is rather one God producing a universe by steps and stages, to the higher of which divinity is assigned. In other words, we see in Hippolytus a clear and emphatic testimony indeed to a rich deposit of Christian faith, but overlying and dominating it a personal interpretation of it which reproduces all the worst defects of the Logos speculation. In this he forms, despite the surface resemblance of his discussion to Tertullian’s, a glaring contrast with that writer. In Tertullian the fundamental faith of the Church comes to its rights and is permitted to dominate the Logos speculation. And it is just in this that his superiority as a theologian to Hippolytus is exhibited. Hippolytus’ thought remains in all essential respects bound within the limits of the Logos speculation. Tertullian’s has become in all essential respects a logical development of the Church’s fundamental faith. It is therefore that it is he and not Hippolytus who became the Father of the doctrine of an immanent Trinity. A comparison of Novatian’s treatise “On the Trinity” 208 will still further strengthen our respect for Tertullian. Novatian seems to have been a diligent student of Tertullian; 209 it might be presumed, therefore, that in this treatise he has drawn upon the master whom he honored by his imitation but never names. Despite, however, Jerome’s declaration that the book is only “a kind of epitome ” 210 of Tertullian’s work, and the repetition of this judgment by a whole series of subsequent writers,211 we find ourselves doubting whether the presumed fact is supported by the treatise itself. Novatian goes his own way, and it is questionable whether there is much common to his treatise and Tertullian’s tract “Against Praxeas,” which may not be best accounted for on the ground of the traditional elements of belief underlying both.212 No doubt Novatian must be supposed to have known Tertullian’s treatise and his own thinking may have been affected by its teaching. But there seems little or no evidence that he has drawn directly upon it for his own work. Novatian’s tract, unlike those of Tertullian and Hippolytus, is not in the first instance a piece of polemics with only incidental positive elements; but is primarily a constructive treatise and only incidentally polemic; moreover, its polemic edge is turned not solely against Monarchianism, but equally against tritheism. In point of form it is an exposition of the Rule of Truth,218 which requires us to believe in God the Father and Lord Omnipotent, in the Son of God, Christ Jesus, the Lord our God, and in the Holy Spirit, once promised to the Church; and its disposition follows these three fundamental elements of the faith (chaps. i.-viii.; ix.-xxviii.; xxix.; with a conclusion, xxx.-xxxi.). To its expository task it gives itself with a conscious effort to avoid wandering off into the refutation of heresies, farther than may be necessary to subserve the purpose in view. “I could set forth the treatment of this subject,” he remarks on one occasion when a heresy is engaging his attention, “by all the heavenly Scriptures … except that I have not so much undertaken to speak against this special form of heresy as to expound the Rule of Truth concerning the person of Christ.” 214 The positive exposition Novatian has set himself to give is very richly worked out and quite justifies Jerome’s admiration of the book. In particular the exegetical demonstration of the divinity of Christ which it offers is very thorough and noble and can scarcely find its superior in ancient literature. Alongside of its zeal for the deity of Christ, its zeal for the unity of God burns warmly, and its Trinitarian doctrine seems to be dominated by the interaction of these two factors. The key to the whole is revealed by Novatian himself when he declares our chief duty to be to contend earnestly that Christ is God, but in such a way as not to militate against the Scriptural /undamentum that there is but one God.215 It is indeed tritheism rather than Monarchianism which causes Novatian the deepest anxiety and though he argues stoutly against the latter, it is his opposition to the former which most decisively determines his own forms of statement. Thus, although he exhibits little vital interest in the Logos speculation for its own sake, and writes rather from the standpoint of the traditional veritatis belonged only to it and not to the ’ Apostles’ Creed ’; and to the ’ Apostles’ Creed ’ only so far as it is built up upon the Trinitarian formula.” This is, however, in effect the essential conception of all the early Fathers: that is to say, the Apostles’ Creed to them is not the Rule of Faith, but only a commodious summary of it.

faith, he is thrown back strongly upon the linear development of the Trinity which is the product of the Logos speculation.210 Laboring to secure the unity of God at all hazards, he feels that he can do this only by emphasizing the origination of the Son; and not attaining to a clear grasp of the conception of eternal generation, he is led to protect the origination of the Son by emphasizing His posteriority to the Father.211 Amid these ideas, it must be confessed, he somewhat flounders. He is earnestly desirous of doing full justice to the deity of Christ, and he feels that in order to do so he must assimilate Him to the eternal God. But he does not know quite how to do this consistently with a fitting proclamation of the unity of God. Accordingly he tells us, on the one hand, that the Son ” was always in the Father “because the” Father was always Father ”: but he at once turns to argue, on the other hand, that the Father must in some sense precede the Son, because it is ” necessary that He who knows no beginning must precede Him that has a beginning ”; and to insist over and over again that there would be two Gods, if there were two who had not been begotten, or two who were without beginning, or two who were self-existent. The doctrine of “eternal generation” is here struggling in the womb of thought: we do not think it quite comes to the birth.

And thus Novatian seems to us to fall back essentially upon the Logos construction, but on the Logos construction so far purified that it is on the point of melting into Nicene orthodoxy. In order to protect the unity of God, in other words, he was led to emphasize not the sameness of the Son and Spirit with God the Father, as Tertullian did with his developed doctrine of the numerical unity of substance, but their difference from Him. The nerve of Novatian’s Trinitarianism thus becomes his strong subordinationism. Though he knows and emphasizes the difference between creation and procession,218 and urges as few others have urged the true divinity of Christ, yet our Lord’s deity is to Him after all only a secondary deity. He 216 See above, pp. 34-36. 21s Cf. Harnack, ii. p. 259, note 3. 217 Chap. xxxi.

had a beginning; He was not self-originated; He was the product of His Father’s will; He exists but to minister to that will; though He be God, He is not God of Himself, but only because “He was begotten for this special result, that He should be God ”; and though He is Lord, He is Lord only because the Father so willed and only to the extent the Father willed.2111 When He says “I and the Father are one,” therefore, ” He referred to the agreement, and to the identity of judgment, and to the loving association itself, as, reasonably, the Father and Son are one in agreement and love and affection.” 220 Tertullian would here have referred to sameness of substance: even Hippolytus would have referred to sameness of power: Novatian’s zeal for the unity of God holds him back, and though he believes the Son to be consubstantial with the Father in the sense that as the son of a man is a man so the Son of God is God, 221 yet he must believe also that He is second to the Father in the strongest sense of that word. This subordination of the Son to the Father is repeated, in his view, in the similar subordination of the Spirit to the Son. So clear is it that, with all his good intentions and upward strivings, Novatian remains, in his theoretical construction of the relationships of the three persons he recognized as God, under the Logos speculation and fails to attain the higher standpoint reached by Tertullian. Revolting from the tritheism of Hippolytus, he yet does not know any other way to secure the unity of God but Hippolytus’ way - that is, by so sharply emphasizing the subordination of the two objects of Christian worship additional to God the Father as to exalt the Father into the sole Self-Existent, Beginningless, Invisible, Infinite, Immortal, and Eternal One. That he guards this subordination better than Hippolytus is a matter of degree and does not erect a difference of kind between them. Novatian marks, no doubt, the highest level of Trinitarian doctrine attainable along the pathway of subordinationism. That this level is lower than the level attained by Tertullian is only evidence that Tertullian’s organizing principle had become no longer subordinationism but equalization. It is, in other words, Tertullian’s formula of numerical sameness of essence with distinction of persons, not the formula of the Logos speculation in which the stress was laid on subordinationism,222 that had in it the promise and potency of the better things to come. From such comparisons as these we obtain a notion of the nature of the step toward the formulation of the Church’s ingrained faith in an immanent Trinity which was made by Tertullian. The greatness of this step is fairly estimable from the fact that Tertullian’s statements will satisfy all the points on which Bishop Bull laid stress in his famous effort to show ” the consent of primitive antiquity with the fathers of the Council of Nice.” These points he sums up in four: 228 “first, that Christ our Lord in His higher nature existed before [His birth of] the most blessed Virgin Mary, and, further, before the creation of the world, and that through Him all things were made; secondly, that in that very nature He is of one substance with God the Father, that is [that] He is not of any created and mutable essence, but of a nature entirely the same with the Father, and consequently very God; thirdly, which is a consequence of this, that He is co-eternal with God the Father, that is, a Divine Person, co-existing with the Father from everlasting; lastly, that He Himself is, nevertheless, subordinate to God the Father, as to His Author and Principle.” Tertullian teaches, in other words, the preexistence, consubstantiality, eternity, and subordination of the Son, and likewise of the Spirit. What, then1 lacks he yet of Nicene orthodoxy? It is this question which Bishop Bull presses; but, as he presses it, he only makes us aware that Nicene orthodoxy cannot quite be summed up in these four propositions. Meeting these four tests Tertullian yet falls short of Nicene orthodoxy, retaining still too great a leaven of the Logos speculation. But that he is able to meet . Bull’s tests, which none of his predecessors or contemporaries can meet, indicates the greatness of the step he marks toward the Nicene orthodoxy.

That we may fairly call Tertullian the father of the Nicene theology there seems to be wanting nothing but some clear historical connection between his work and that of the Nicene fathers. It is over-exigent no doubt to demand an external proof of connection. The silent influence of Tertullian’s discussion supplemented by that of Novatian 224 supplies a sufficient nexus. But we naturally desire to trace in some overt manifestations the working of this influence. A step toward providing this is afforded by the episode of the ” two Dionysii,” in which the Roman Dionysius out of his Western Trinitarian consciousness corrects and instructs his less well-informed Alexandrian brother, who had permitted himself to speak of our Lord after a fashion which betrayed the most unformed conceptions of the relations of the distinctions in the Godhead. The letter of Dionysius of Rome (259-269 A.D.) Against the Sabellians, a considerable portion of which has been preserved by Athanasius in his “Letter in Defense of the Nicene Definition,” 225 is very properly appealed to by Athanasius as an instance of Niceneism before Nice. It seems clearly to be dependent on Tertullian, though, as Harnack puts it, “no single passage in it can be pointed out which is simply transcribed from Tertullian, but Dionysius has, rather in opposition to the formula of Dionysius of Alexandria, developed further in the direction of orthodoxy Tertullian’s Trinitarian doctrine.” 22 G Quite in the Roman manner 221 Dionysius turned the edge of his polemic as much against tritheism as against Monarchianism, and thus, by insisting on” the gathering up of the Divine Triad into a summit,” preserved the unity of the common essence and so helped forward to the formulation of the homoousios. Similarly by his insistence that the Son was no ” creature ” ( 1roi17µa) and was not “made” ( -ye-yoveva,) but “begotten ” (-yeyevviju0a,), he laid the foundations of the Nicene formula of” begotten, not made,” which also thus goes back through him to Tertullian. Nothing could be more instructive than the emergence into the light of history of this instance in the latter half of the third century of the greater readiness of the West to deal with the Trinitarian problem than the East.

We need seek no other historical link, however, between Western orthodoxy and the East than that provided by ” the great Hosius ” himself, who was the channel by means of which the formulas beaten out in the West, primarily by Tertullian, were impressed on the East in the Nicene symbol. We are credibly told by Socrates 228 that Hosius disputed in Alexandria on ” substance ” (ovula) and ” person” ( v1rburau,s) prior to the Nicene Council; and his dominant influence with the emperor as well as the prominent place he occupied in the Council itself afford sufficient account of the successful issue of that Council in establishing Tertullian’s formula of” one substance and three persons ” - the oµoouu,os in effect - as the faith of the whole Church.229 If despite Athanasius’ hint that it was Hosius who “set forth the Nicene Faith,” 230 we cannot quite say that Hosius was the ” draftsman ” of the Nicene Creed,281 since that Creed was formally framed by a series of amendments out of a formula offered by Eusebius of Cresarea, yet what is implied in such a statement is essentially true.

Hosius was the effective author of the Nicene Creed, and that is as much as to say that in its fundamental assertions that Creed is a Western formulary, 232 and its roots are set in the for what was to come, by this Westerner, the heir of the Western Trinitarianism, but in the choice of the term ” hypostasis ” for ” person ” a reflection of Tertullian’s substantiva res - especially as we are told that Hosius was on this occasion especially zealous in guarding against Sabellian tendencies. We must not, however, push the details of Socrates’ report too far.

teaching of Tertullian. It was thus given to Tertullian to mark out the pathway in which the Church has subsequently walked and to enunciate the germinal formulas by means of which the Arians were ultimately overcome.

It would be wrong, of course, to derive from these facts, striking as they are, the impression that Tertullian’s influence was the only important force operative in the Church for the formation of the doctrine of the Trinity. It would be truer to see in Tertullian and in his definitions only one manifestation of a universally working tendency making steadily toward this end.

Wherever the Rule of Faith, which was rooted in the formula of the baptismal commission, formed the fundamental basis of Christian belief, and wherever the data supplied by this Rule of Faith were interpreted in the forms of the Logos speculation, there was constantly in progress a strenuous effort to attain clarity as to the relations of the distinctions in the Name designated by the terms Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And this is as much as to say that every thinking man in the Church was engaged with all the powers of construction granted to him in working out this problem. Even the Monarchians themselves, to whom in the providence of God it was given to keep poignantly before the eyes of men the items of the faith which were likely to be neglected by the Logos speculation, were yet apt to express themselves more or less in its terms.233 Accordinfluences ”; ii. p. 14, line 53: “The positive declarations of the symbol can be historically understood only when we remember that the emperor was a Westerner and … was directed by the advice of Western counsellors, especially Hosius “;iv.pp. 45-46: “Only the influence of the West-Constantine (although he understood Greek) had Western counsellors - explains the acts of the Synod of Nice: the characteristic terminology of the Nicamum … fits, in its entirety, only Western conceptions.”

ingly from the very beginning Christian literature is filled with adumbrations of what was to come. Already in Athenagoras Tertullian’s doctrine of eternal pre-prolate distinctions in the Godhead almost came to birth; already in Theophilus Origen’s doctrine of eternal generation seemed on the verge of conception. Least of all did the great Alexandrian divines wait for Tertullian’s initiative. Origen, for example, his younger contemporary, and at once the calmest and profoundest thinker granted to the Church in the Ante-Nicene age, went his own independent way toward the same great goal. Only, Origen sought the solution of the problem not with Tertullian by separating the Logos from the cosmic processes and thereby carrying the distinctions in the Godhead, freed from all connection with activities ad extra, back into the mysteries of the innermost modes of the divine existence, but by pushing the cosmic processes themselves, along with the Logos, back into, if not the immanent, at least the eternal modes of the divine activity. Thus he gave the Church in full formulation the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son of God, indeed, but along with it also the doctrine of eternal creation: and by his failure to separate the Son from the world, with all that was, or seemed to be, involved in that, he missed becoming the father of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity by becoming instead-well or ill understood, but at least not unnaturally - the father of Arianism. It was not along this pathway that the Church doctrine of the Trinity was to be attained, but rather along that beaten out by the feet of Tertullian.234 And this, simply because the Church doctrine of the Trinity could not come to its rights within the limits of the Logos speculaeffect of their movement was to elevate and deepen the conception of the Spirit and His work.

tion, and Origen’s construction preserved the essential elements of the Logos speculation while Tertullian’s prepared the way for transcending it.

To put the matter into somewhat abstract form, the immanent movement of Christian thought, we conceive, took some such course as the following. The Logos speculation laid its stress on the gradations of deity manifested in the Logos and the Spirit, and just on that account did less than justice to the Church’s immanent faith in which the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost appeared as equal sharers in the Name. That justice might be done to the immanent faith of the Church, therefore, it was essential that the stress should be shifted from gradations of deity to the equality of the persons of the Godhead. This correction carried with it the confession not merely of the eternity of these persons, but also their unchangeableness, since not only eternity but also unchangeableness is an essential attribute of deity, and must belong to each person of the Godhead if these persons are to be seriously conceived to be equal. That justice might be done to these conceptions, it obviously was not enough, then, that a basis for the prolations should be discovered in the eternal existence form of God, nor indeed merely that personal distinctions underlying these prolations should be carried back into eternity, nor merely that the prolations themselves should be pushed back into eternity. In the last case the eternal prolates must further be conceived as in no sense inferior to the unprolate deity itself, sharers in all its most intimate attributes - not only in its eternity and unchangeableness, therefore, but also in its exaltation, or in the speech of the time, its “invisibility,” including self-existence itself. But so to conceive them involved, of course, the evisceration of the entire prolation speculation of its purpose and value - as may be readily perceived by reading in conjunction the chapters of Tertullian (who is still so far under the control of the Logos speculation) in which he argues that” invisibility” is the peculiarity of the Father in distinction from the Son, the very characteristic of the Son being His “visibility,” 233 and the discussion of Augustine 286 in which he solidly argues that the Son and Spirit are, because equally God with the Father, also equally” invisible” with the Father.287 The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity could not become complete, in other words, until, under the pressure of the demand of the Christian consciousness for adequate recognition of the true and complete deity of the Son and Spirit, the whole conception of prolations of deity for specific functions had been superseded by a doctrine of eternally persisting personal distinctions in the Godhead itself. The way was prepared for this historically, no doubt, in large measure, by pushing the idea of prolation back into eternity, as Origen did, where it took the form of a doctrine of eternal generation and procession, and in so doing lost its primary significance and grew nigh to vanishing awayfor what is the value of an essential, eternal, and unchangeable prolation of deity which, just because essential, eternal, and unchangeable, can have no inherent relation to activities ad extra? But the real goal was attained only when the whole idea of prolation, thus rendered useless and meaningless, had fallen away, and the Logos speculation gave place to something better. And it was Tertullian’s definitions, not Origen’s speculations, which prepared the way for the attainment of this goal. So that it was not Origen but Tertullian who become the real father of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

It is, of course, quite possible to exaggerate the measure in which this revolution of thought is traceable in the pages of Tertullian. It is first discernible in its completeness in the expositions of Augustine two centuries later. But it seems sufficiently clear that the beginnings of the line of development which ended in Augustine are perceptible in Tertullian.288 Their mark is his insistence on the equality of the Son and Spirit with the Father, an insistence in which he fairly enunciated the great conception afterward embodied in the term homoousios. Tertullian, however, still lived and moved and had his being under the spell of the Logos speculation; he did not even perceive, as did Origen, that the notion of prolations before time must give way to the higher conception of eternal generation and procession - much less that even this latter conception is of doubtful utility. Athanasius himself, indeed, did not perceive this last - and therefore the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, worked out under his inspiration, still preserves these shells of outlived speculation, the kernel of which has withered away. 239 The phraseology in which they are embodied keeps its place even in the forms of statement of Augustine. The hold which the Logos speculation had on the minds of men is in nothing made more manifest than in such persistence of its forms in subsequent thought, after they had lost all their meaning. In very truth the Logos speculation provided the common ground on which the whole world of fourth century Christian thought still stood; and Arian differed from Athanasian largely only as the left wing differs from the right wing of the same fundamental type of thinking.240 The merit of Tertullian is that his definitions, though still adjusted to the forms of the Logos speculation, had in them the potency of a better construction and were sure sooner or later to burst the shell in which they were artificially confined. In his recognition of the eternity of the personal distinctions in the Godhead apart from all questions of prolation, and in the emphasis he laid upon the equal deity of these persons, he planted fruitful seed which could not fail of a subsequent growth. Men might still cling to the old forms and seek merely to match the downward development which emphasized the distinction of the prolations from the fontal deity until it had degraded them into temporal creatures of the divine will, by emphasizing for themselves rather their eternity and their equality with God.241 But by this very movement upward it was inevitable that the very idea of prolation, which was the core of the Logos speculation, should lose its significance and be pushed first out of notice and then out of belief - until the whole conception of a linear trinity should disappear and there should emerge the completed Trinitarianism of an Augustine, to whom the persons of the Trinity are not subordinate one to another but coordinate sharers of the one divine essence.

It is, of course, not the close of this process of thought that we see in Tertullian, but its beginning. But in him already appears the pregnant emphasis on the equality rather than the graded subordination of the personal distinctions in the Godhead, by the logical inworking of which the whole change in due time came about. So far as we can now learn it was he first, therefore, who, determined to give due recognition to the elements of the Church’s faith embodied in the Rule of Faith, pointed out the road over which it was necessary to travel in order to do justice to the Biblical data. Say that he was in this but the voice of the general Christian consciousness. It remains that it was left to him first to give effective voice to the Christian consciousness, and that it was only by following out the lines laid down by him to their logical conclusion that the great achievement of formulating to thought the doctrine of the triune God was at length accomplished.