Against Praxeas 1–10

In various ways the devil has rivaled the truth. Sometimes he has tried to shake it by defending it. He champions one only God, the almighty maker of the world, so as to make a heresy even out of the oneness. He says that the Father himself came down into the virgin, was himself born of her, himself suffered; in short, that he himself is Jesus Christ. The serpent forgot himself: for when he tempted Jesus Christ after John's baptism, he approached him as the Son of God, sure that God had a Son, even from the very Scriptures out of which he was then building his temptation: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread”; and again, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written that he has given his angels charge over you” (he, that is, the Father) “that they may lift you up in their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” Or will he reproach the Gospels with a lie, saying: “Let Matthew and Luke see to it; but I approached God himself, I tempted the Almighty himself face to face; that is why I approached, that is why I tempted. But if he had been the Son of God, I would never have deigned to tempt him”? But he himself is rather a liar from the beginning, and so is any man he has suborned of his own, like Praxeas. For this man was the first to bring this kind of perversity from Asia to Roman soil, a restless man in other ways too, and puffed up besides with boasting of martyrdom on account of a mere, simple, short spell of tedium in prison; when, even if he had handed over his body to be burned, he would have gained nothing, not having the love of God, whose spiritual gifts he also fought against. For when the bishop of Rome was already acknowledging the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and on the strength of that acknowledgment was bestowing peace on the churches of Asia and Phrygia, this same man, by asserting falsehoods about these prophets and their churches and by defending the authority of his predecessors, forced him both to recall the letters of peace already sent out and to desist from his purpose of receiving the spiritual gifts. So Praxeas did two pieces of the devil's business at Rome: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy; he put the Paraclete to flight and crucified the Father. Praxeas' tares had sprouted here too, sown over the good seed while many slept in the simplicity of their doctrine; then, exposed through the one God chose, they even seemed to have been pulled up. In fact the teacher had given a written guarantee of his amendment, and the document remains with the psychics, among whom the matter was then transacted. From then on, silence. And we, indeed, were afterwards separated from the psychics by our acknowledgment and defense of the Paraclete. But those tares had then shaken out their seed everywhere. For some time it lay hidden, with a cunning vitality, through hypocrisy, and now it has broken out afresh. But it will be rooted out afresh too, if the Lord wills, in this season of respite; if not, on its own day all the adulterous crops will be gathered and burned with the other stumbling blocks in unquenchable fire.

So, after a time, the Father born and the Father suffering, God himself, the Lord Almighty, is proclaimed as Jesus Christ. We, however, always, and now the more as being better instructed by the Paraclete, the guide into all truth, believe indeed in one only God, yet under this dispensation, which we call “economy”: that the one only God has also a Son, his own Word, who has proceeded from him, “through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made.” We believe that he was sent by the Father into the virgin and born of her, man and God, Son of Man and Son of God, and named Jesus Christ; that he suffered, died, and was buried according to the Scriptures, and was raised by the Father, and taken back into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead; who thereafter, according to his promise, sent from the Father the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That this rule has come down from the beginning of the gospel, even before any of the earlier heretics, let alone before Praxeas, a man of yesterday, will be proved both by the lateness of all heretics and by the very novelty of Praxeas of yesterday. By this, against all heresies alike, let it be settled in advance from now on that whatever is first is true, and whatever is later is adulterated. But without prejudice to this prescription, room must still be given everywhere to discussion as well, for the instruction and protection of some; if only so that each perversity may not seem to be condemned without examination, by prejudgment; this one above all, which thinks it possesses the pure truth, since it thinks that the one only God cannot be believed in otherwise than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are the very selfsame. As if in this way too the One were not all, since all are from the One, that is, through unity of substance; while nevertheless the mystery of the economy is guarded, which arranges the unity into a trinity, setting out three, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit: three, however, not in condition but in degree, not in substance but in form, not in power but in aspect; yet of one substance and one condition and one power, because there is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned under the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. How they admit of number without division, the following discussion will show.

For all the simple people, not to call them unwise and uneducated, who always form the majority of believers, since the rule of faith itself transfers them from the many gods of the world to the one and true God, not understanding that he is indeed to be believed as one, but together with his economy, take fright, because they presume that the economy, with its number and arrangement of a trinity, is a division of the unity; whereas the unity, deriving the trinity from itself, is not destroyed by it but administered. So they are forever tossing it about that two and three are preached by us, while they presume that they are worshipers of one God; as if unity gathered together irrationally did not also make heresy, and trinity rationally weighed did not establish truth. “We hold the monarchy,” they say; and even Latins pronounce the very sound so vocally and so skillfully that you would think they understand the monarchy as well as they pronounce it. But I, if I have picked up anything of either language, know that monarchy means nothing else than single and unique rule; yet monarchy does not, because it belongs to one, prescribe that he whose it is should either not have a son, or have made himself his own son, or not administer his monarchy through whom he will. Indeed I say that no dominion is so much one's own, so singular, so much a monarchy, that it is not also administered through other persons closely connected with it, whom it has itself provided as its officers. And if he whose monarchy it is has a son as well, it is not at once divided and does not cease to be a monarchy if the son too is taken as a sharer in it; but it belongs chiefly to him from whom it is communicated to the son, and while it is his, it is still a monarchy, being held together by two who are so united. So if the divine monarchy too is administered through so many legions and armies of angels, as it is written, “A thousand thousands stood before him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand ministered to him,” and has not therefore ceased to belong to one, so as to cease to be a monarchy, because it is managed through so many thousands of powers: how is it that God should seem to suffer division and dispersion in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, who have been allotted the second and third place, and who are so closely sharers in the Father's substance, when he does not suffer them in so great a number of angels, and those indeed so foreign to the Father's substance? Do you reckon the members, the pledges, the instruments, the very power and entire wealth of the monarchy as its overthrow? Not rightly. I would rather you exercised yourself on the sense of the thing than on the sound of the word. For you must understand the overthrow of the monarchy to be this: when another dominion, with a condition and state of its own, and therefore a rival, is brought in over it; when another god is introduced against the Creator; then it is wrong, when there are more gods, as with the Valentinians and the Prodicians; then it is the overthrow of the monarchy, when it means the destruction of the Creator.

For my part, since I derive the Son from no other source than the substance of the Father, doing nothing without the Father's will, having received all power from the Father, how can I, as a matter of faith, destroy the monarchy, which I preserve in the Son as handed down to the Son by the Father? Let this be said by me of the third degree too, since I think the Spirit comes from no other source than from the Father through the Son. See, then, whether it is not rather you who destroy the monarchy, since you overturn its arrangement and dispensation, set up in as many names as God has willed. And it remains in its own condition, even though a trinity is brought in, so much so that it has even to be restored to the Father by the Son, since the apostle writes of the final end: “when he has delivered the kingdom to God and the Father. For he must reign until God puts his enemies under his feet”; that is, according to the psalm: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet”; “but when all things have been subjected to him, except him who subjected all things to him, then he too will be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all.” We see, then, that it does no harm to the monarchy that it is now with the Son, since it is both in its own condition with the Son and will be restored with its own condition to the Father by the Son. So no one will destroy it on this account if he admits the Son, to whom it is established that it was handed down by the Father, and by whom it is at some time to be restored to the Father. By this one passage of the apostolic letter we could already have shown that the Father and the Son are two, not only from the names of Father and Son but also from the fact that he who delivered the kingdom and he to whom he delivered it, and likewise he who subjected and he to whom he subjected, must necessarily be two.

But since they want the two to be one, so that the Father and the Son are held to be the same, the whole question of the Son must also be examined: whether he is, and who he is, and how he is; and so the matter itself will claim its own form from the Scriptures and from the interpretations that support them. Some say that Genesis too begins thus in Hebrew: “In the beginning God made for himself a Son.” Since this is not firm, other arguments lead me from God's own arrangement, in which he was before the founding of the world, up to the generation of the Son. For before all things God was alone, himself his own world and place and all things; alone, however, because there was nothing else outside him. Yet not even then was he alone; for he had with him what he had in himself, namely his Reason. For God is rational, and Reason was first in him, and so all things are from him. This Reason is his own thought; the Greeks call it logos, a word by which we also mean “speech” (sermo); and so it is now customary among our people, through simple translation, to say that the Word (Sermo) was in the beginning with God, whereas “Reason” is the more fitting term, because from the beginning God was rational, not word-bearing, and because the Word itself, consisting in Reason, shows Reason to be prior, as its own substance. Yet even so it makes no difference. For although God had not yet sent out his Word, he still had him within himself, with and in his Reason itself, silently thinking and arranging with himself the things he was soon to say through the Word. For thinking and arranging with his Reason, he made that into Word which he was handling by word. That you may understand this more easily, recognize it first from yourself, as from the image and likeness of God: that you too have reason in yourself, you who are a rational animal, made not only by a rational craftsman but also given life from his substance. See how, when you silently commune with yourself in reason, this very thing happens within you, reason meeting you together with word at every movement of your thought, at every impulse of your mind. Whatever you think is word; whatever you perceive is reason. You must speak it in your mind, and while you speak, you have the word as your partner in conversation, in which this very reason is present, by which, thinking with it, you speak, and through which, speaking, you think. So the word is, in a way, a second within you. How much more fully, then, is this so in God, whose image and likeness you too are reckoned to be? So I may, not rashly, have laid down beforehand that even then, before the founding of the universe, God was not alone, having in himself both Reason and, in Reason, the Word, which he had made second to himself by stirring it within himself.

This power and this arrangement of the divine mind is shown in the Scriptures under the name of Sophia (Wisdom) as well. For what is wiser than the Reason or Word of God? So hear Wisdom too, established as a second person: “First the Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works, before he made the earth, before the mountains were set in place; and before all the hills he begot me”: that is, founding and begetting me in his own mind. Then recognize her standing by him in the very work: “When he prepared the heavens,” she says, “I was present with him; and when he made strong the clouds above over the winds, and when he set firm the fountains of what is under heaven, I was with him, fitting things together; I was the one in whom he rejoiced; and daily I delighted in his presence.” Now, as soon as God willed to bring forth into their own substances and forms the things he had arranged within himself with the Reason and Word of Wisdom, he first put forth the Word himself, having in himself his inseparable companions, Reason and Wisdom, so that all things might be made through him through whom they had been thought out and arranged, indeed already made, so far as God's mind was concerned. For this was what they lacked: to be known and held openly too, in their own forms and substances.

Then, therefore, the Word himself also takes his own form and adornment, sound and voice, when God says, “Let there be light.” This is the perfect birth of the Word, when he proceeds from God: first established by him for thought, under the name of Wisdom, “The Lord established me as the beginning of his ways”; then begotten for effect, “When he prepared the heavens, I was present with him”; thereafter, making him his Father, from whom by proceeding … he became the Son, the firstborn, as begotten before all things, and only-begotten, as alone begotten from God, properly from the womb of his own heart, as the Father himself also testifies: “My heart has poured forth an excellent Word.” To him, rejoicing in his turn, the Father, likewise rejoicing in his presence, says, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” and, “Before the morning star I begot you.” So also the Son, in his own person, confesses the Father under the name of Wisdom: “The Lord established me as the beginning of his ways for his works; and before all the hills he begot me.” For if here Wisdom seems to say that she was established by the Lord for his works and ways, while elsewhere it is shown that all things were made through the Word and without him nothing was made, as again, “By his Word the heavens were made firm, and all their powers by his Spirit” (that is, by the Spirit who was in the Word), it is clear that it is one and the same power, now under the name of Wisdom, now under the title of Word, which received the beginning of the ways for God's works and which made the heavens firm, through which all things were made and without which nothing was made. No more on this, as though it were not the Word himself, under the name of Wisdom and of Reason and of the whole divine mind and spirit, who became the Son of God, from whom he was begotten by going forth. “So,” you say, “you grant that the Word is some substance, built up of spirit and the imparting of Wisdom?” Certainly. For you will not have him be substantive in reality through a property of substance, lest he should be seen to be a thing and a kind of person, and so, being constituted as second to God, be able to make two, Father and Son, God and the Word. “For what is a word,” you say, “but voice and sound of the mouth, and, as the grammarians teach, air struck, intelligible to the hearing, but otherwise something empty and void and incorporeal?” But I say that nothing empty and void could have come forth from God, since it was not put forth from what is empty and void; nor could that lack substance which proceeded from so great a substance and made such great substances; for he himself made the things that were made through him. How could it be that he is nothing, without whom nothing was made; that, being empty, he made solid things, being void, full things, being incorporeal, corporeal things? For although something can sometimes be made different from that through which it is made, nothing can be made through that which is void and empty. Is the Word of God, then, a void and empty thing, he who is called the Son? He who is himself named God? “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is written, “You shall not take the name of God in vain.” This is certainly he who, “being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God.” In what form of God? Surely in some form, not in none. For who will deny that God is body, although “God is spirit”? For spirit is body of its own kind, in its own form. And if even those invisible things, whatever they are, have with God their own body and their own form, by which they are visible to God alone, how much more will that which was sent forth from his own substance not be without substance! Whatever, then, the substance of the Word was, that I call a person, and for it I claim the name of Son; and while I acknowledge the Son, I maintain that he is second to the Father.

Here, if anyone thinks I am introducing some probolē, that is, a putting forth of one thing from another, as Valentinus does, producing Aeon after Aeon from an Aeon, I will first say to you: the truth does not refrain from using this word, and the thing it means, and its sense, because heresy also uses it; rather, heresy took from the truth what it could build into its own falsehood. Was the Word of God put forth, or not? Take your stand here with me. If he was put forth, recognize the probolē of the truth, and let heresy look to it, if it has imitated something of the truth. The question now is who uses a thing and its word, and how. Valentinus distinguishes and separates his probolae from their author, and places them so far from him that the Aeon does not know the Father; in fact it longs to know him and cannot, and is even almost swallowed up and dissolved into the rest of the substance. With us, however, the Son alone knows the Father, and has himself revealed the Father's bosom, and has heard and seen all things with the Father, and speaks what he has been commanded by the Father; and he has accomplished not his own will but the Father's, which he knew from nearby, or rather from within. For “who knows the things that are in God, except the Spirit who is in him?” The Word is built of spirit and, so to speak, the Spirit is the body of the Word. So the Word is both always in the Father, as he says, “I am in the Father,” and always with God, as it is written, “And the Word was with God,” and never separated from the Father or other than the Father, since “I and the Father are one.” This will be the probolē of the truth, the guardian of unity, by which we say that the Son was put forth from the Father, but not separated. For God put forth the Word, as the Paraclete also teaches, as a root puts forth a shoot, a spring a river, the sun a ray. For these forms too are probolae of the substances from which they come. And I would not hesitate to call the shoot the son of the root, the river the son of the spring, the ray the son of the sun; for every origin is a parent, and everything brought forth from an origin is offspring; much more the Word of God, who has also received the name of Son in the proper sense. Yet the shoot is not cut off from the root, nor the river from the spring, nor the ray from the sun, any more than the Word from God. So, according to the pattern of these examples, I confess that I speak of two, God and his Word, the Father and his Son. For the root and the shoot are two things, but joined; the spring and the river are two aspects, but undivided; the sun and the ray are two forms, but cohering. Everything that comes forth from something must be second to that from which it comes forth, yet it is not therefore separated. And where there is a second, there are two; and where there is a third, there are three. For the Spirit is third from God and the Son, as the fruit from the shoot is third from the root, and the channel from the river third from the spring, and the point of light from the ray third from the sun. Yet nothing is estranged from the source from which it draws its own properties. So the Trinity, running down from the Father through degrees that are intertwined and connected, does not stand in the way of the monarchy at all, and protects the condition of the economy.

Keep hold everywhere of this rule, which I have professed, by which I testify that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are inseparable from one another, and so you will recognize what is said and how. For see, I say that the Father is one, the Son another, and the Spirit another (every uneducated or perverse person takes this saying wrongly, as if it sounded like diversity and from diversity implied a separation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; but I say it of necessity, since they contend that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are the same, flattering the monarchy against the economy); yet the Son is other than the Father not by diversity but by distribution, other not by division but by distinction; because the Father and the Son are not the same, differing from each other even in measure. For the Father is the whole substance, while the Son is a derivation and portion of the whole, as he himself confesses: “Because the Father is greater than I.” By him he is also sung in the psalm as made a little lower than the angels. So the Father too is other than the Son, being greater than the Son; the one who begets is other than the one begotten, the one who sends other than the one sent, the one who makes other than the one through whom it is made. It is well that the Lord too, using this word of the person of the Paraclete, indicated not division but arrangement: “I will ask the Father,” he says, “and he will send you another Advocate, the Spirit of truth”; thus the Paraclete is other than himself, as we say the Son is other than the Father, so that he might show the third degree in the Paraclete, as we show the second in the Son, out of regard for the economy. Does not the very fact that they are called Father and Son mean that the one is other than the other? For surely all things will be what they are called, and will be called what they will be; and the difference of names cannot be confused at all, since neither can that of the things whose names they will be. “Yes, yes; no, no; for whatever is more than this is from the evil one.”

So he is either Father or Son; and just as day and night are not the same, so the Father and the Son are not the same, so that both should be one and each the other, as these most empty Monarchians would have it. “He made himself his own Son,” they say. On the contrary, the Father makes the Son, and the Son the Father; and those who are made from one another can in no way be made by themselves for themselves, so that the Father should make himself his own Son and the Son present himself as his own Father. What God has established, he himself also keeps. The Father must have a Son in order to be Father, and the Son a Father in order to be Son. But to have is one thing, to be another. For example, to be a husband I must have a wife; I shall not myself be my wife. So also, to be a father, I shall have a son; I shall not myself be my son; and to be a son I shall have a father; I shall not myself be my father. For I shall be these things if I have what makes me them: a father if I have a son, a son if I have a father. But if I am myself one of these, I no longer have what I myself shall be: neither a father, because I shall myself be the father, nor a son, because I shall myself be the son. And inasmuch as I must have the one and be the other, to that extent, if I am both, I shall not be the one, since I do not have the other. For if I am myself the son who is also the father, I no longer have a son, but am myself the son. And not having a son, since I am myself the son, how shall I be a father? For I must have a son to be a father. So I am not a son either, since I have no father, who makes a son. Likewise, if I am myself the father who is also the son, I no longer have a father, but am myself the father. And not having a father, since I am myself the father, how shall I be a son? For I must have a father to be a son. So I shall not be a father, since I have no son, who makes a father. This will be the whole cleverness of the devil: to exclude the one by the other, and, while shutting both up into one under favor of the monarchy, to cause neither to be held, so that he is not Father, since he has no Son, and he is not Son, since likewise he has no Father; for while he is Father, he will not be Son … So they hold the monarchy who hold neither Father nor Son. “But nothing is difficult for God”: who does not know this? And “things impossible with the world are possible with God”: who is ignorant of it? And “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”: we have read it all. “So,” they say, “it was not difficult for God to make himself both Father and Son, contrary to the form handed down for human affairs. For it was not difficult for God, against nature, to make a barren woman bear, or a virgin either.” Certainly nothing is difficult for God. But if we use this maxim so recklessly in our presumptions, we shall be able to invent anything we like about God, as if he had done it because he could have done it. But it is not to be believed that because he can do all things he has therefore also done what he has not done; we must ask whether he has done it. God could, if he had wished, have fitted man with wings for flying, as he gave them to kites; yet, because he could, he did not therefore do it. He could also have extinguished Praxeas and all the heretics together at once; yet, because he could, he did not extinguish them. On this reasoning there will be something difficult for God too, namely whatever he has not done, not because he could not, but because he would not. For with God, to be able is to will, and not to be able is not to will. But what he has willed, he both could and has shown. So, since if he willed to make himself his own Son he could, and since if he could he did, you will prove that he could and willed only when you have proved that he did.