Modalism

The formula: Father, Son and Spirit, three names of a single person

In other words: imagine a single actor coming on stage three times under three different costumes — one day as creator king, one day as suffering son, one day as consoling spirit. That is exactly the Modalist thesis: there is only one divine person, presenting himself successively as Father in creation, as Son in redemption, as Spirit in sanctification. The distinctions of the Trinity would not be real persons, but energies, modes or aspects — hence the name Modalism.^[4]

The watchword of its partisans is simple and pious in appearance: "We hold the monarchy" — Monarchiam tenemus. One God, one sovereignty, one face. Tertullian reports that simple Christians, unable to follow his learned word economy, answered him with this cry: if there are a Father and a Son who are really distinct, then there must be two or three gods.^[5]

"We hold the monarchy!" — the cry of simple believers, reported by Tertullian in facing the Modalists^[6]

Behind this cry lies a sincere conviction: the Modalists declare forcefully that God is one, entirely and perfectly one, and that Jesus Christ is God, entirely and perfectly God. On these two points they are right — and that is what makes the error seductive: it starts from two truths to destroy a third, the real distinction of the persons.^[7]

The tell-tale word: when the Father suffers on the cross

The Modalist reasoning is implacable, and its adversaries turn it back like a weapon: if the Father and the Son are strictly the same person, then no denial can prevent the conclusion — it is the Father who was born, the Father who suffered, the Father who died, the Father who sits at his own right hand. Catholic polemicists use ridicule: here then is a Father who sends himself, who prays to himself in Gethsemane, who forsakes himself on the cross.^[8]

That is why the Latin West calls these heretics the Patripassians — those who make the Father suffer — and why Tertullian forges for them the nickname Monarchians. In the East they will most often be called Sabellians, after the man who brought the system to completion.^[9]

The table of faith: what the Church confesses against Modalism

The enigma of the Logos among the Apologists

To understand the Modalist appeal, one must see the embarrassment of second-century Catholic theologians. The Apologists — Justin, Tatian, Theophilus — explain the faith with the philosophy of their time: God would be alone from all eternity with his inner Word, his Reason (logos endiathetos), then this Word would be uttered, begotten, become Son with a view to creation (logos prophorikos). The distinction of the Son from the Father is then told as a kind of emission in two stages.^[13]

The result worries simple believers: the Son appears as a derived and secondary God, charged alone with creation, visibility and suffering, while the Father remains invisible and impassible in his heaven. God's unity seems to split in two, even three, and Jesus Christ seems less than the Father. It is against this learned mythology — resembling at times polytheism, at times Gnostic emanations — that Modalism protests: let us return to the simplicity of faith, one God, and Jesus who is that God.^[14]

"Lest they should seem to assert two gods, or else deny the Saviour's deity." — Origen, Commentary on Titus, fragment II^[15]

Origen himself, though an adversary of the Modalists, understands the dilemma of Rome's guardians of the faith: to welcome at first the simple formulas of Sabellius was to refuse to say two gods and to refuse to deny that Jesus is God. Modalism was born of a good theological intention — protecting God's unity — pushed to the point of denying the Trinity.^[16]

Christians who already confused, before Noetus

The idea was not born one morning in Smyrna. Saint Justin, as early as the mid-second century, knows Christians who teach the identity of the Father and the Son (First Apology, 63; Dialogue with Trypho, 128). In Hermas, the Son and the Holy Spirit still merge. But it was left to Noetus and his school to categorically deny that God's unity is compatible with a distinction of persons.^[17]

Moses and Aaron: the self-proclaimed prophet

Around the year 200, at Smyrna in Asia Minor, a certain Noetus begins to teach that the Father and the Son are but one — and that one may therefore say that the Father suffered. The man lacks neither audacity nor staging: he calls himself Moses, and his brother Aaron. Summoned before the Church's presbyters and accused of teaching that the Father suffered, he first denies it; then, having gained a few disciples, he is questioned again and expelled from the Church. He dies shortly after, and is refused Christian burial.^[18]

Hippolytus, who tells us the story, cannot resist mocking: Noetus would be a disciple of Heraclitus, the philosopher of the union of opposites, since he teaches a God at once visible and invisible, passible and impassible. The mockery is cruel, but it hits home on one point: to make the invisible Father a visible and suffering Father is to confuse what Scripture distinguishes.^[19]

"What harm am I doing in glorifying Christ?"

Noetus's retort to the presbyters has remained famous — and it shows that the heretic believes himself Christ's friend against timid clerics:

"What harm am I doing in glorifying Christ?" — Noetus of Smyrna, questioned by the presbyters, according to Saint Hippolytus, Against Noetus, 1^[20]

And here is the presbyters' answer — a whole programme: no philosophy, no system, but Tradition, the rule of faith received from the Apostles:

"We too know in truth one God; we know Christ; we know that the Son suffered even as He suffered, and died even as He died, and rose again on the third day, and is at the right hand of the Father, and cometh to judge the living and the dead; and what we have learned we declare." — the presbyters of Smyrna, according to Saint Hippolytus, Against Noetus, 1^[21]

The lesson is crucial: faced with error, the presbyters do not refute Noetus with a counter-system, but with the Apostles' Creed, which suffices. The Creed and the New Testament make the distinction of the persons limpid, and the Church's traditional prayers are unambiguous.^[22]

The school reaches Rome: Epigonus and Cleomenes

Noetus dead, his disciple Epigonus carries the doctrine to Rome. Then Cleomenes, Epigonus's disciple, founds a school there — with the approval of Pope Zephyrinus (199-217), then of his successor Callistus I. It is from this Roman school that Sabellius will emerge.^[23]

From Asia to Rome, then to Carthage before 206-208

The first Modalist to visit Rome was probably Praxeas, come from Asia, who then reached Carthage some time before 206-208. Praxeas was apparently not a true school leader: the arguments Tertullian refutes a few years later in his Against Praxeas are doubtless those of the Roman Monarchians themselves.^[24]

But Praxeas had already made a name for himself in Rome for quite another exploit. The bishop of Rome had just recognized the prophetic gifts of Montanus, Prisca and Maximilla — the Montanists of Phrygia — and granted them his letter of peace. Praxeas, by importunate accusations against the prophets and their Churches, and by invoking the authority of the bishop's predecessors, forced him to recall his letter and to withdraw recognition of these gifts.^[25]

The double service rendered to the devil

Tertullian, who tells the scene, passes on Praxeas a crushing judgment, among the most quoted in all patristic literature:

"By this maneuver, Praxeas rendered a double service to the devil at Rome: he drove away prophecy, and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father." — Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 1^[26]

The formula strikes home because it says everything: the same man who silenced the Spirit — the Paraclete of the Montanists, whom Tertullian, himself become a Montanist, defended — is the one who puts the Father to death on the cross. And Tertullian adds, not without irony, that Praxeas's tares at first seemed uprooted — Praxeas himself signed a retraction with his own hand — before growing back all the more vigorously, masked for a time, then bursting into the open.^[27]

"I know one God, Jesus Christ": the saying of Zephyrinus

At Rome, the crisis becomes a palace affair. Pope Zephyrinus, whom his adversary Hippolytus depicts as a simple, unlettered old man, ends up deciding in favour of Modalist formulas, at the instigation of Callistus, then his deacon and trusted man. Hippolytus lends him this declaration:

"I know one God, Jesus Christ, and besides Him no other, who was born and who suffered." — Pope Zephyrinus, according to Saint Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, IX^[28]

But Hippolytus at once adds — and this is crucial — that the old pope completed his sentence: "It was not the Father who died, but the Son." The reporter is a declared adversary, and his testimony must be read with that reservation; but one understands why a pope guarding the faith could look favourably on the simple affirmations of Sabellius against speculations that seemed to make two gods.^[29]

Callistus himself, become pope (217-222), reproached Hippolytus, not without reason, for teaching two gods — proof that the debate opposed not cynics to saints, but two contrary anxieties: unity or distinction.^[30]

Callistus excommunicates Sabellius — and Hippolytus accuses Callistus

Sabellius had quickly become the leader of Rome's Monarchians, perhaps even before Zephyrinus's death (c. 218). Hippolytus hoped to convert him to his own views, and attributed his failure to Callistus's influence. Yet Callistus, become pope, excommunicated Sabellius around 220 — "for fear of me", Hippolytus specifies with his usual lack of modesty.^[31]

Far from being satisfied with this condemnation, Hippolytus accuses Callistus of having in turn invented a new heresy, combining the views of Theodotus — the dynamic Monarchian who made Christ an adopted man — with those of Sabellius, while excommunicating both. The accusation says much about the Roman confusion: for a few years, Rome excommunicates, protects, condemns and suspects in turn, and both parties hurl the anathema back at each other.^[32]

Sabellius, for his part, was apparently still in Rome when Hippolytus was writing his Refutation (between 230 and 235). Of his earlier and later life, nothing certain is known — not even his homeland: Saint Basil and others make him a Libyan of the Pentapolis, but this claim seems to rest solely on the fact that the Pentapolis was found, around 260, full of Sabellianism by Dionysius of Alexandria.^[33]

The silent Father who speaks as Son

With Sabellius, Modalism ceases to be a protest of simple folk and becomes a system. According to Epiphanius, he drew his views from the Gospel According to the Egyptians, an apocryphon whose fragments confirm this parentage. And here, transmitted by Saint Athanasius, is his most elaborate formula: the Father is the Son and the Son is the Father — one hypostasis, two in name.^[34]

"As there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit, so the Father is the same, but is developed into Son and Spirit." — Sabellius, according to Saint Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians, IV, 25^[35]

The Father would be the silent, inactive Monad, speaking, creating and acting as Son — then withdrawing. Here, curiously, we find again the Apologists' pattern of the inner Word then uttered: the whole difference would lie in Sabellius maintaining unity of hypostasis after the emission of the Word as Son, where his adversaries date it from before creation.^[36]

Theodoret reports that Sabellius spoke of one hypostasis and three prosopa — three faces or characters; Saint Basil notes that he readily admitted three prosopa in a single hypostasis. In words, this is almost Tertullian's future formula — three persons, one substance — but Sabellius meant by it three modes of a single person, not three real persons.^[37]

The full dossier on the man — his doctrine of the Father who expands then contracts, his Eastern posterity, his definitive condemnation — is treated in the dedicated article: Sabellianism.

When Jesus prays, sends and is sent

Before learned treatises, there is the text — and the text distinguishes relentlessly. At Christ's baptism, the Son comes up out of the water, the Spirit descends like a dove, and the voice of the Father is heard from heaven: three actors together in a single scene (Mt 3:16-17). On the cross, Jesus does not forsake himself: he cries "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" (Mt 27:46) — the one who speaks is not the one to whom he speaks.^[38]

Tertullian piles up scriptural proofs with implacable method. His king argument comes from Saint Paul: "when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father... then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him" (1 Cor 15:24-28). The one who hands over the kingdom and the one to whom it is handed over, the one who subjects and the one to whom all is subjected, are necessarily two really distinct persons.^[39]

"Now, from this one passage of the epistle of the inspired apostle, we have been already able to show that the Father and the Son are two separate Persons: not only because they are separately named, Father and Son, but because he who delivered up the kingdom, and he to whom it is delivered up, must necessarily be two." — Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 4^[40]

And if the number of the Trinity scandalizes, what of the plural of Genesis — "Let us make man in our image" (Gen 1:26)? A being absolutely alone and singular would have said: make, my image, my likeness. The divine plural heralds the plurality of persons in simple unity.^[41]

The rule of faith: what the Church believed before Praxeas

Tertullian's decisive blow is no subtlety; it is anteriority. Here is the rule of faith come down to us "from the beginning of the Gospel, before any of the old heretics, and much more before Praxeas, the pretender of yesterday":

"We, however, as we indeed always have done, believe that there is one only God, but under the following dispensation, or oikonomia, as it is called: that this one only God has also a Son, His Word, who proceeded from Himself, by whom all things were made, and without whom nothing was made; that He was sent by the Father into the Virgin, and was born of her — both man and God, Son of man and Son of God —, that He suffered, died and was buried according to the Scriptures, was raised by the Father, taken up into heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead; He who sent from heaven, from the Father, according to His promise, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit." — Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 2^[42]

And Tertullian states the principle that holds against all heresies: "whatever is first is true, whereas that is spurious which is later in date" — Praxeas's very novelty condemns him.^[43]

Tertullian invents the vocabulary: economy, Trinity, person, substance

It is in this treatise, written around 213 — shortly after his adherence to the New Prophecy movement^[44] — that Tertullian fixes for centuries the Latin vocabulary of Trinitarian faith: trinitas, persona, substantia, oeconomia. The economy — the inner administration of the mystery — holds the two truths together: unity of substance and distinction of persons. The persons are distinct, not separate: distinction without division.^[45]

The learned word economy, which simple folk did not understand, has become the word of every catechism: one God, three persons. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says it again today in the same terms: the divine persons are really distinct from one another, without dividing the divine unity — "God is one, but not solitary"^[46].

Novatian, Dionysius, Origen: the whole Church answers

Tertullian is not alone. Novatian, at Rome around 250, writes his De Trinitate against those who say the Son is the Father^[47]. Origen fights Monarchianism throughout his work. And around 260, the affair rebounds at Alexandria: Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, in refuting the Sabellians of the Pentapolis, expresses himself awkwardly about the Logos and his relation to the Father — to the point of being accused at Rome of making the Son a creature.^[48]

Pope Dionysius (259-268) then convenes a synod at Rome around 260 and writes to Alexandria a letter condemning both errors in a single gesture: teaching that the Son is a creature is an impiety equal, though contrary, to that of Sabellius. The bishop of Alexandria justifies himself in a Refutation and Apology in four books, and the pope declares him cleared of all suspicion.^[49]

The Roman lesson is luminous: the Church symmetrically refuses both idolatries — dividing God into two gods, or confusing the persons into one. It is the same balance Nicaea will hold a century later.^[50]

Two centuries of locks: the chronology of an extinction

Canon 7 is without appeal: the Sabellians, "who teach the identity of the Father and the Son", are not received by simple anointing like the Arians or Macedonians — they must receive baptism, as though they had never entered the Church. This shows how deeply the error touches the foundation itself: a Christian is not baptized twice, but he whose baptism ignored the Trinity is baptized for the first time.^[54]

Beryllus of Bostra: the bishop convinced by Origen

In the 240s, Bishop Beryllus of Bostra, in Arabia, teaches that the Saviour has no proper pre-existence before the Incarnation and no divinity of his own: it is the Father's divinity that dwelt in him. Summoned to a synod, he is convinced of his error by Origen in the course of the disputation — and Eusebius of Caesarea states that the minutes of the discussion were still known in his own time.^[55]

The episode shows two things: that Modalism could seduce even a bishop in charge, and that the Church preferred to convince rather than cut off when the pastor remained in good faith.

Sabellianism does not die with Sabellius. In the fourth century, Arians and Semi-Arians affect to be in great fear of it — and Pope Julius's alliance with Marcellus of Ancyra gives some colour to the accusation that the Nicene formulas open the way to Sabellianism.^[56]

A few names mark this posterity:

• Marcellus of Ancyra develops a Monarchianism of his own, which his disciple Photinus pushes much further — both anathematized by name by Constantinople I alongside the Sabellians^[57].
• Priscillian, in fourth-century Spain, professes an extreme Monarchianism; to him are even attributed the Monarchian Prologues to the Gospels carried by most old Vulgate manuscripts^[58].
• The fourth-century Fathers — such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa in his Against Sabellius — target a more developed form than the one known to Hippolytus: the consummation of creation would consist in the return of the Logos into the Father, so that the original unity, compromised for a time, would be restored only at the end — "that God may be all in all"^[59].

History could have stopped in 381. It started again in 1913. At the Arroyo Seco camp meeting in California, the Canadian preacher R. E. McAlister notes a discrepancy: Christ commands baptism "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt 28:19), but the Apostles, in Acts, baptize "in the name of Jesus Christ" (Acts 2:38). The conclusion drawn by his hearers: the Trinitarian formula would be inaccurate; one must baptize in the name of Jesus alone — and behind the formula, the whole Trinity is rejected: Jesus alone would be God, Father, Son and Spirit at once.^[60]

The movement — called Oneness Pentecostalism — causes the split of the Assemblies of God as early as 1916, then organizes itself: in 1945, the merger of two Oneness groups gives birth to the United Pentecostal Church International, which makes baptism in the name of Jesus alone a condition of salvation.^[61]

The dossier is instructive: seventeen centuries after Noetus, the same mechanism produces the same error — starting from the baptismal texts of Acts, isolated from Christ's command in Matthew, to dissolve the persons into a solitary God. The Church answers today as in 381: canon 7 has not aged.^[62]

Note in passing: other modern doctrines brush against Modalism without embracing it — thus Emanuel Swedenborg, whose dossier is treated separately: Emanuel Swedenborg.

Modalism is a heresy with two faces, and that is why it always returns. On the one hand, it defends two non-negotiable truths: God is one, and Jesus is God. Whoever forgets them the better to refute Sabellius falls into the reverse error — a diminished Son, a divided God, a latent Arianism. On the other, it sacrifices the third truth, without which the first two collapse: the persons are really distinct.^[63]

The Catholic faith holds all three together, in the formula Tertullian forged against Praxeas and which the Catechism repeats: one God, three really distinct persons, equal and inseparable. Neither three gods nor three masks — "God is one, but not solitary"^[64].

"We believe that there is one only God... who has also a Son, His Word... and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete." — Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 2^[65]

• Sabellianism — the finished system of Sabellius: the Father expanding into Son and Spirit
• The heresies of the early centuries — the panorama: from Gnosticism to Docetism, from Marcionism to Arianism
• The Nestorian crisis and The Monophysite crisis — when the Church had to defend first the unity, then the duality of the natures
• Adoptianism — the other Monarchianism: the Christ-man merely adopted by God
• Montanism — the prophetic movement Praxeas silenced at Rome
• John Chapman, Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), Monarchians — full text on newadvent.org
• Tertullian, Against Praxeas — full English text (Holmes trans.) on newadvent.org/fathers
• Hefele, History of the Councils, vol. I — Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople