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Of more serious intrinsic importance than this quarrel of liturgical
observance was another controversy which began in the reign of this
same pope, St. Victor I, and which raged around the divinity of the
Second Person of the Divine Trinity, the Logos incarnate in Jesus
Christ. The discussions which now began continued at intervals for the
first half of the third century. Then, after a peace of fifty years,
they revived, and for a good hundred and fifty years more they were the
chief feature of the Church's history.
The traditional belief was simple. God is one and there is but one God.
Jesus Christ is God, being the incarnate second term of the Divine
Trinity, God the Son or Logos. The Logos is nevertheless not the
Father. The intelligence of believers, and their piety, continued to
meditate and probe these traditional data, always with a hope of better
understanding, and with the practical aim of making the tradition seem
reasonable to critics from outside. Two questions in the main divided
the attention of these theorists, the relation between the human and
the divine in Our Lord, and the way in which the divine in Our Lord was
divine. This second question had been already discussed by St. Justin.
Now it was the turn of the first, and when the theorists, in their
efforts to conciliate seemingly contradictory beliefs, stumbled into a
denial of the tradition, a school of thinkers arose to set them right
who in turn stumbled into errors on the Trinitarian question.
There came to Rome towards the end of the pontificate of Eleutherius
(175-189) a wealthy citizen of Byzantium, one Theodotus, by trade a
dealer in leather. He had apostatised in a recent persecution, and now
sought to hide his shame in the great city. He was less successful,
however, than he had hoped; and taxed with his record he retorted that
after all, in denying Jesus Christ he had not denied God, for Jesus was
but a man, the holiest of men admittedly, upon whom the Christ had
descended in the form of a dove when he was baptized in the Jordan by
John but, for all that, no more than a man. To support the theory
Theodotus produced a catena of texts from Holy Scripture. The pope, St.
Victor I, in 190 excommunicated him, but Theodotus remained obdurate.
He gathered round him a number of adherents, and soon was the leader of
a sect taken from the most erudite circle of the Roman Church.
Logicians, mathematicians, scientists, they used the comparative method
and along with their Bibles studied Euclid and Galen and Aristotle: The
Church tradition occupied a very small place in their critical labours,
where indeed grammar and logic extracted from the Scriptures all they
craved to know, How long the sect continued as a sect we do not know.
But through one of its members of the second I generation, Artemus (fl.
235), its teaching passed to the notorious bishop of Antioch, Paul of
Samosata, the friend of that Lucian who was the teacher of Arius and
the real father of Arianism. The theories of Theodotus do not seem to
have seriously troubled the peace of the Church, at any rate during his
own lifetime. With the contemporary theory which bears the cumbrous
name of Patripassian Monarchianism it was far otherwise. The thinkers
responsible for this theory were moved by the desire to safeguard the
two traditional truths of the unity of God and the real divinity of
Jesus Christ, and to refute the suggested contradiction between the
two. But their theory only achieved its end by identifying Father and
Son, thus sacrificing a third truth of the tradition, namely that the
Father and Son are really distinct. [ ]
The first to bring this theory to Rome was, according to Tertullian,
Praxeas in the closing years of the second century. Thence Praxeas had
passed into Africa where Tertullian routed him, and, better still,
converted him. Another account makes Smyrna the seat of the heresy's
first beginnings and Noetus its founder. From Smyrna, after the
excommunication there of Noetus, it came to Rome with one of his
disciples, Epigonus, somewhere between 198 and 210. The Monarchists
speedily became known, and the theory became the exclusive topic of
discussion in the Roman Church. Nor was the cause of truth and peace at
all assisted by the presence in Rome of a double opposition to
Monarchianism. The Roman Church opposed it for the innovation it was;
but, at the same time, it met with opposition of a very different
character, the reasoned opposition of a philosopher, from the greatest
scholar in the Roman Church, the priest Hippolytus. It was the
misfortune of the Roman Church that between its officials and
Hippolytus there was soon a war as bitter as that between either of
them and the Monarchists. Nor did Hippolytus scruple to charge the
official opposition with complicity with the heretics. On the other
hand Hippolytus and his followers, in their ingenious defence of one
truth, came very near to denying others. The task of the historian is
not made easier by the fact that our knowledge of these transactions is
due, in the very largest measure, to the writings of St. Hippolytus
himself, -- written before the saint's reconciliation and martyrdom,
when, the first of all the anti-popes, he was himself leading a schism
against the lawful Bishop of Rome.
When Epigonus arrived in Rome to set up his school of Theology, mindful
of the condemnation at Smyrna and perhaps knowing of the fate that had
befallen Praxeas at the hands of Tertullian, he tempered his zeal with
caution. It was his good fortune that the pope St. Zephyrinus (199-217)
was an administrator rather than a scholar, and as Epigonus and his
chief lieutenant, the more famous Sabellius, showed their belief in the
reality of Our Lord's divinity in an instructed attack on the recently
condemned Theodotus, they speedily gained a name for orthodoxy and the
favour of the pope. But if Zephyrinus, lacking both taste for this
theorising and skill in its practice, saw no more in the new party than
welcome allies against the Adoptionists, this was by no means the case
with Hippolytus. The writings of this great man have most of them
perished, but enough remains to show that in him the Roman Church
possessed a scholar of an erudition like to that of Origen. With the
erudition, there went, alas, an uncomfortable impatience of ignorance
in high places, and a genius for rough and bitter language that recall
his other contemporary, Tertullian. In the events of the next few years
both the learning and the caustic wit of St. Hippolytus were to have
every opportunity. He now attacked Sabellius as he had attacked
Theodotus; and when the pope refused to endorse the letter of his
attacks, refused to make his own the learned theories by which
Hippolytus was routing the new heresy, Hippolytus turned to attack the
pope. Zephyrinus, however, stood firm. He refused to enter the
dangerous ground of the rival philosophical explanations of the
tradition, and contented himself with a steady re-affirmation of what
had always been believed "I only know one God Who suffered and died,
Jesus Christ and beyond Him no other. It is not the Father Who died but
the Son."
In 217, while the three-cornered controversy was still raging,
Zephyrinus died. He had ruled for nearly twenty years, but during all
that time there had been a "power behind the throne", a greater man
than himself, on whom, wisely enough, he relied. This was his deacon
Calixtus. Calixtus had had an unusually exciting life. Years before, as
a slave, he had managed his master's bank. He was unlucky enough to
lose his master large sums of money, some of it in bad debts where the
debtors were Jews. His efforts to recover from them led to a riot and,
the Jews denouncing him as a Christian, he was sent to penal servitude
in the mines of Sardinia. About the year 190 he was set free and
returned to Italy. The accession of Zephyrinus found him at Antium, a
pensioner of the Roman Church. The new pope brought him back to Rome
and ordained him deacon, one of that council of seven who saw to the
management of the Roman Church's temporal business. Calixtus was a man
of affairs, a practical administrator, and in the influence of Calixtus
over his master, Hippolytus saw the reason for the pope's reluctance to
condemn Sabellius and the rest in terms of his theory. Hippolytus was,
then, already personally hostile to Calixtus when Zephyrinus died. When
Calixtus was elected to succeed him, the learned and choleric
Hippolytus seceded, accusing Calixtus of Monarchianism, and of holding
that the distinction of terms in the Trinity is incompatible with the
divine unity.
Hippolytus had a numerous following. They gathered round him and he set
up his sect as the true Church in opposition to the " Monarchist "
Calixtus. Meanwhile Calixtus had acted. He condemned Sabellius and
excommunicated him as an innovator in the traditional belief, but he
did not, in so doing, make his own the subtle reasoning by which
Hippolytus exposed the heresy and explained the compatibility of the
related truths.
That reasoning is indeed subtle, and to distinguish it from the heresy
which makes the Logos a second inferior God calls for a philosophical
mind and much good will. Nevertheless, although he did not adopt the
ideas of Hippolytus, neither did St. Calixtus condemn them.
The schism of Hippolytus -- he was never thrust out of the Church but
left it himself -- continued long after the death of St. Calixtus (222)
and of his successor Urban I. In the persecution of Maximin, which was
directed mainly against the rulers of the Church, Hippolytus, a
confessor now in the mines of Sardinia, found himself the
fellow-sufferer of the lawful pope Pontianus (235). There, under what
circumstances no record remains, he was reconciled to the power he had
so long denied, and the Church honours him among her martyred saints.
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