He Crucified the Father

The devil has rivaled the truth and fought against it in all sorts of ways. Sometimes his aim has been to destroy the truth by defending it. He insists that there is one Lord only, the Almighty Creator of the world — and he insists on it so that out of this teaching about oneness he can manufacture a heresy. He says that the Father himself came down into the virgin, that the Father himself was born of her, that the Father himself suffered; that the Father, in fact, was himself Jesus Christ. [b]

Here the old serpent has fallen out with himself. When he tempted Christ after John’s baptism, he came at him as “the Son of God” — plainly granting that God had a Son, and granting it on the authority of the very Scriptures he was forging his temptation out of at that moment: “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” And again: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written, He will put his angels in charge of you” — meaning the Father, surely — “and they will carry you in their hands, so that you do not strike your foot against a stone.”

Or perhaps, after all, he was only accusing the Gospels of lying, and what he meant was this: “Away with Matthew, away with Luke! Why listen to a word they say? Whatever they write, I tell you it was God himself I came to; it was the Almighty himself I tempted face to face, and I came to him for no other purpose than to tempt him. If it had only been the Son of God, I would most likely never have stooped to deal with him.” But he is a liar from the beginning, and so is any man he sets to work in his own way — Praxeas, for instance.

Praxeas was the first to bring this crooked teaching to Rome from Asia. He was a restless man in other ways too, and swollen above all with the pride of being a confessor — and that for no better reason than that he had put up with the nuisance of prison for a short while. On that showing, even if he had handed his body over to be burned, it would have done him no good, since he did not have the love of God. And it was God’s own gifts that he set himself against and destroyed.

For the overseer of Rome had already acknowledged the prophetic gifts of Montanus, Prisca and Maximilla, and on the strength of that acknowledgment had granted his peace to the churches of Asia and Phrygia. Praxeas kept pressing false charges against the prophets themselves and against their churches, kept insisting on what the overseer’s predecessors in that chair had ruled, and so forced him to call back the letter of peace he had already sent out and to drop his plan of acknowledging those gifts. By this Praxeas did the devil two services at Rome: he drove prophecy out and he brought heresy in; he put the Paraclete to flight and he crucified the Father.

Praxeas’s weeds had been sown here as well, and had borne their fruit here, while many were asleep in the plainness of their faith. They did seem to have been pulled up once they were found out and exposed by the man God was pleased to use for it. Praxeas himself had deliberately gone back to his old and true faith, and taught it after renouncing his error; his statement in his own handwriting is still in the keeping of the men of the soul, in whose company the business took place at the time. After that nothing more was heard of him. As for us, we withdrew from the men of the soul later on, when we came to acknowledge the Paraclete and hold to him.

But by then Praxeas’s weeds had shaken out their seed everywhere. It lay hidden for a while, its life masked, and now it has broken out again with fresh growth. It will be rooted up again, if the Lord wills, even now; and if not now, then on the day when all the bundles of weeds are gathered together and burned up, along with every other stumbling block, in unquenchable fire.

So, in the course of time, the Father was born, if you please, and the Father suffered — God himself, the Lord Almighty, whom they announce in their preaching to be Jesus Christ. [i]

We, for our part, believe what we have in fact always believed — and believe it all the more since the Paraclete has taught us better, the one who does lead people into all truth. We believe that there is one God only, but under the following arrangement, or oikonomia, as it is called: that this one and only God also has a Son, his Word, who came out from him, through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made. We believe that the Father sent him into the virgin and that he was born of her, being both man and God, Son of Man and Son of God, and that he was called by the name Jesus Christ. We believe that he suffered, died and was buried, according to the Scriptures; that the Father raised him again and took him back to heaven; that he is seated at the Father’s right hand; and that he will come to judge the living and the dead. We believe that from heaven, from the Father, he also sent the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, as he had promised — the one who makes holy the faith of those who trust in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.

That this rule of faith has come down to us from the beginning of the good news, before any of the older heretics and much more before Praxeas, an upstart of yesterday, will be plain from two things: from the late date that marks every heresy, and from the sheer novelty of our brand-new Praxeas. And here is an assumption we may use from now on with equal force against every heresy there is — that whatever comes first is true, and whatever comes later is counterfeit.

Still, while keeping that ruling intact, some room has to be given for going over what the heretics say, for the instruction and the safety of various people — if only so that it does not look as though each twisting of the truth were condemned without examination and simply prejudged. That is especially so with this heresy, which supposes it has the pure truth in hand: it thinks there is no way to believe in one God only except by saying that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the very same person.

As if this were not also a way for one to be all — all being of one, by unity of substance — while the mystery of the arrangement is still kept safe. The arrangement distributes the unity into a Trinity, setting the three in their order: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Three, however, not in condition but in degree; not in substance but in form; not in power but in appearance — and yet of one substance, one condition and one power, since he is one God, and it is from him that these degrees and forms and appearances are counted, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. How they can be counted without being divided will be shown as this book goes on.

The simple people — I will not call them thoughtless and unschooled — who are always the majority of believers, take fright at the arrangement of the three in one. Their very rule of faith moves them away from the world’s crowd of gods to the one true God, and they do not see that although he is the one and only God, he still has to be believed in together with his own oikonomia. They take the ordering and the counting of the Trinity to be a division of the unity, when in fact the unity, which draws the Trinity out of itself, is so far from being destroyed by it that it is actually held up by it. [o]

They are forever throwing it at us that we preach two gods and three gods, while they take to themselves, above everyone else, the credit of worshipping the one God — as if unity itself, worked out by bad reasoning, did not produce heresy, and the Trinity, reasonably understood, the truth. “We hold the monarchy,” they say. And as far as the sound goes, even Latins, and ignorant ones at that, pronounce the word so well that you would suppose their grasp of monarchia was as complete as their pronunciation of it. So: Latins take pains to pronounce monarchia, and Greeks refuse to understand oikonomia.

For my part, if I have picked up any knowledge of either language, I am sure that monarchia means nothing but a single and sole rule. But even so, this monarchy does not — just because it is the rule of one — keep the one whose rule it is from having a son, or from having made himself his own son, or from running his own monarchy through whatever agents he pleases. More than that: I maintain that no dominion belongs so entirely to one alone, is so much his own, so single, so much a monarchy, that it is not also carried on through others most closely bound up with it, whom it has itself provided as its officers. And if there is a son belonging to the one whose monarchy it is, the monarchy does not therefore become divided and stop being a monarchy when the son too is taken in as a sharer in it. In its origin it is still equally his, since it is he who passes it on to the son; and being his, it is every bit as much a sole rule, since it is held together by two who are inseparable.

So then, the divine monarchy too is administered by so many legions and armies of angels, as it is written: “A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.” It has not stopped being the rule of one on that account, just because it is administered by so many thousands of powers. How is it, then, that God is supposed to suffer division and severance in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, who are given the second and third places, and who are joined so closely to the Father in his substance — when he suffers nothing of the kind in the crowd of all those angels?

Do you really think that those who are members of the Father’s own substance by nature, the pledges of his love, the instruments of his might — his very power, in fact, and the whole working of his monarchy — are the overthrow and ruin of it? You are wrong to think so. I would rather you worked at the meaning of the thing than at the sound of the word. What you must understand by the overthrow of a monarchy is this: when a second dominion is brought in on top of it, one that has a framework and a standing of its own, and is therefore a rival — when, for instance, some other god is introduced against the Creator, as in Marcion’s opinions, or when many gods are introduced, as with your Valentinuses and your Prodicuses. That does amount to an overthrow of the monarchy, because it involves the destruction of the Creator.

But as for me — I derive the Son from no other source than the substance of the Father; I present him as doing nothing apart from the Father’s will and as having received all power from the Father. How, then, could I possibly be destroying the monarchy in the faith, when I keep it safe in the Son exactly as the Father committed it to him? I want the same said, formally, about the third degree in God, because I believe the Spirit comes from no other source than from the Father through the Son. [u]

Look to it, then, that it is not rather you who are destroying the monarchy, when you overthrow the plan and the arrangement of it, which has been set up in as many names as it has pleased God to use. It stands so firm and steady in its own standing, even with the Trinity brought into it, that the Son actually has to give it back whole to the Father. That is what the apostle says in his letter, about the very end of everything: “When he shall have handed over the kingdom to God, the Father; for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” — following, of course, the words of the Psalm: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” “But when all things have been made subject to him — except for the one who put all things under him — then the Son himself will also be made subject to the one who put all things under him, so that God may be all in all.”

So we see that the Son is no obstacle to the monarchy, even though it is at present administered in the Son’s keeping; because with the Son it is still in its own standing, and with its own standing it will be given back to the Father by the Son. No one, then, will damage it by admitting the Son to it, since it is certain that the Father committed it to him and that in due course he has to hand it back to the Father.

And out of this one passage in the letter of the inspired apostle we have already been able to show that the Father and the Son are two separate persons — not only from the mention of their separate names, Father and Son, but from the fact that the one who hands over the kingdom and the one to whom it is handed over, and likewise the one who put all things under and the one to whom they were put under, must necessarily be two different beings.

But since they will have the two be only one, so that the Father may be reckoned the same as the Son, it is only right that the whole question of the Son be looked into: whether he exists, and who he is, and in what way he exists. That way the thing itself will take its own proper shape from the Scriptures and from the readings that stand guard over them. [w]

Some people claim that even Genesis opens like this in Hebrew: “In the beginning God made himself a Son.” There is no ground for that, so I am driven to other arguments, drawn from God’s own arrangement, in which he existed before the world was created, right up to the begetting of the Son.

For before all things God was alone — being to himself universe and space and all things. He was alone, because there was nothing outside him but himself. And yet not even then was he alone, for he had with him what he had within himself: his own Reason. God is rational, and Reason was in him first, and so all things came from him. This Reason is his own thought, which the Greeks call logos — a word we also use for Word or Speech.

That is why it has become usual among our people, from the plain and simple way the term is translated, to say that the Word was in the beginning with God; although it would be more fitting to treat Reason as the older, because God did not have Speech from the beginning, but had Reason even before the beginning, and because Speech itself is made up of Reason, which it thereby shows to have existed first as its own substance. Not that the distinction matters much in practice. For although God had not yet sent his Word out, he still had him within himself, both in company with his Reason and included in it, while he silently planned and arranged within himself everything he was afterwards going to say through his Word. And while he was planning and arranging in this way with his own Reason, he was in the very act of making into Word the thing he was handling in the way of word and speech.

To make this easier to take in, look first at yourself, since you are made “in the image and likeness of God.” Ask why you too have reason in you, being a rational creature — not only made by a rational Craftsman, but actually brought to life out of his substance. Notice, then, that when you are talking silently with yourself, this whole business is carried on inside you by your reason, which meets you with a word at every movement of your thought, at every push of what you conceive. Whatever you think, there is a word; whatever you conceive, there is reason. You cannot help saying it in your mind, and while you are saying it you admit speech as a partner in the conversation with you. Your reason is bound up in that speech, so that while in thought you are holding a conversation with your word, you are also, by the same exchange running the other way, producing thought by means of that conversation with your word.

So in a way the word is a second person inside you, through which you utter speech in thinking, and through which also, the process running back again, you generate thought in uttering speech. The word is a different thing from yourself. Now how much more fully all this is transacted in God, whose image and likeness you are reckoned to be, seeing that he has reason within himself even while he is silent, and within that Reason his Word. I may then lay this down first, and without rashness: that even then, before the creation of the universe, God was not alone, since he had within himself both Reason and, inherent in Reason, his Word, which he made second to himself by stirring it within himself.