Sabellianism

What is known: Rome, around 215-220

Of Sabellius himself, almost nothing is known for certain — neither his homeland, nor his formation, nor his end. What history retains with solidity comes down to three facts: he taught in Rome in the years 215-220, he quickly became the leader of the capital's Monarchians, perhaps even before the death of Pope Zephyrinus around 218, and he was excommunicated by Pope Callistus I around 220.^[3]

He came out of the Roman school founded by Cleomenes, disciple of Epigonus, himself a disciple of Noetus of Smyrna: the whole filiation of the error is Roman and continuous, from Smyrna to the capital of the Empire.^[4] Saint Hippolytus, who polemics against him in his Refutation of All Heresies written between 230 and 235, shows him still present in Rome at that date: Sabellius therefore survived his condemnation by at least fifteen years, without anyone knowing what became of him afterwards.^[5]

A Libyan from the Pentapolis?

Saint Basil and other ancient authors make Sabellius a Libyan native of the Pentapolis, the region of Cyrenaica. But this claim seems to rest on fragile retrospective reasoning: around 260, Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria found the Pentapolis full of Sabellianism, and it was deduced that the master must have come from the country where his disciples swarmed.^[6]

Caution is therefore required: Sabellius may be Libyan, he is surely Roman by theological adoption. What is certain is that his name remained attached to the East: in Greek, the Modalists are almost always called the Sabellians, while the Latin West speaks rather of Patripassians.^[7]

Excommunication by Pope Saint Callistus I

Pope Saint Callistus I (218-222) excommunicated Sabellius around 220. Saint Hippolytus, the pope's fierce enemy, claims that Callistus acted only out of fear of him — "fearing me", he makes him say — and in the same breath accuses him of having invented a new heresy by combining the views of Theodotus with those of Sabellius, even as he excommunicated them both: the contradiction of the accusation sufficiently shows its bad faith.^[8]

The essential remains: Rome decided. The successor of Peter declared that the identity of the Father and the Son was not the faith of the Apostles, and Sabellianism, driven out of Roman communion, set off to conquer the East — where it would prosper for more than a century and a half.^[9]

In other words: imagine a single sun which, at the dawn of history, would extend its rays to enlighten the world as Son, then would spread its warmth as Spirit, before folding rays and warmth back into itself once the work is accomplished. That is exactly the vision of Sabellius: a single God unfolding himself in time under three successive figures, then reabsorbed into his first unity. The persons are not eternal realities — they are phases of the history of salvation.^[10]

A single hypostasis, three names

Here, as reported by hostile witnesses — first and foremost Saint Athanasius, in chapter 25 of his Fourth Discourse Against the Arians — is the doctrine of Sabellius in its most elaborate form: the Father would be the Son and the Son the Father, a single hypostasis under two names. Since Sabellius left no preserved writing, this formula is a reconstruction from his adversaries, not a quotation from his own hand.^[11]

Everything is said: in God there is but one single subsistent reality (mia hypostasis), and the words Father, Son, Spirit designate only three appellations (treis onomasiai) of this unique reality. The distinction of the persons is therefore neither real nor eternal: it belongs to vocabulary, not to the being of God.^[12]

The Son-Father: the strange word huiopatôr

Saint Athanasius further reports that the Sabellians forged for Christ the compound word υἱοπάτωρ, huiopatôr — literally the Son-Father. The incarnate Word would be at once son inasmuch as he is born of Mary and father inasmuch as he is none other than the Father himself manifested in the flesh.^[13]

The word betrays the system better than any treatise: where faith confesses a Son begotten of the Father from all eternity, Sabellius knows only a Father who becomes Son in time, for the time of a mission, before becoming simply Father again.^[14]

Three successive dilations in history

According to the concurring testimonies of Hippolytus, Epiphanius and Athanasius, Sabellius taught that the unique God dilates himself (platynetai) in three directions over the course of salvation history: as Father, he gives the Law in the Old Testament; as Son, he accomplishes redemption in the New Testament; as Spirit, he sanctifies the Church after the Ascension. Then, the work accomplished, he contracts himself (systelletai) and returns to his silent unity.^[15]

The consequence is redoubtable, and the fourth-century Fathers will make it explicit: if the persons are only temporary roles, then the Trinity itself is temporary. When the drama of salvation is over, there will be neither Father, nor Son, nor Spirit any more — only the solitary monad of the beginning. Saint Gregory of Nyssa will aim precisely at this developed form: the consummation would consist in the return of the Logos into the Father, so that God may be all in all.^[16]

The analogy of the sun

To spread this doctrine, the Sabellians proposed — according to Saint Epiphanius — the comparison of the sun: one and the same star unites round shape, light and warmth; likewise, one and the same God unites Father, Son and Spirit. The image seduces by its simplicity, but it confesses exactly the error: roundness, light and warmth do not dialogue with one another, do not love one another, do not send one another — they are properties of a thing, not persons.^[17]

That is the whole difference with Catholic analogies: the Church never compares the persons to qualities of an object, but confesses subsistent relations — a Father who begets, a Son who is begotten, a Spirit who proceeds — really distinct and really loving from all eternity.^[18]

The avowed source: the Gospel according to the Egyptians

Saint Epiphanius affirms that Sabellius drew his views from the Gospel according to the Egyptians, a second-century apocryphon, and the preserved fragments of this writing confirm this filiation: in it one reads notably that the Saviour declares he came to destroy the work of the female — meaning, according to the ancient interpreters, to abolish the distinction of the sexes and, more broadly, every created distinction, after the image of divine indistinction.^[19]

The fact is significant: where faith is ruled by the received Scriptures and the Tradition of the Churches, Sabellius appeals to a gospel rejected by the Church. Heresy is also recognized by its sources.^[20]

What each ancient witness reports about Sabellius

It must be said honestly: Sabellius was not condemned on the first day. Under Pope Zephyrinus (199-217), his simple formulas were at first rather well received in Rome — and one understands why: faced with theologians who seemed to make the Son a derived and secondary God, charged alone with creation and suffering, Sabellius restored to Christ all his divinity and to God all his unity. Refusing to say two gods, refusing to deny that Jesus is God: who would dare condemn such a programme?^[27]

Origen himself, though an adversary of the Modalists, understands this dilemma of Rome's guardians of the faith: first welcoming Sabellius was refusing to "seem to assert two gods, or, on the contrary, to deny the divinity of the Saviour".^[28]

The detail of this Roman crisis — Zephyrinus, Callistus, Tertullian, Hippolytus — belongs to the general dossier: Modalism. The proper contribution of Sabellius was to transform a protest of the simple into a philosophical system: with him, the error ceases to be a cry of the heart and becomes a complete doctrine of God, of history and of salvation. That is why the East, more speculative, adopted it with passion.^[29]

Around 260, a province full of Sabellianism

Forty years after the Roman excommunication, the error had conquered the East. Around 257-260, Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria discovers that the Pentapolis of Libya — the five cities of Cyrenaica: Cyrene, Ptolemais, Arsinoe, Berenice and Apollonia — is full of Sabellianism: clerics and faithful commonly teach there the identity of the Father and the Son.^[30]

The fact perhaps explains the tradition which makes Sabellius a Libyan: the doctrine had prospered so well in his alleged native country that he ended up being born there. Whatever his homeland, his posterity was African and massive — to the point of requiring the personal intervention of the greatest bishop of the East.^[31]

The letter to Ammonius and Euphranor

To refute the Sabellians of Libya, Dionysius writes around 260 his famous letter to Ammonius and Euphranor. His method is strikingly commonsensical: he insists on the proofs of Christ's humanity — his fatigues, his hunger, his suffering — to show that the Father is not the Son: if the Father and the Son were the same person, one would have to say that the invisible Father hungered, was wearied, was crucified.^[32]

But Dionysius, carried away by his polemic, forces the point in the reverse direction: to distinguish the Son well from the Father, he expresses himself inaccurately about the Logos and his relation to the Father, to the point of seeming to make the Son a creature. Denounced in Rome, he will have to explain himself — the first example of a trap lying in wait for all adversaries of Sabellius: by dint of distinguishing the persons, dividing the substance.^[33]

The synod of Rome (around 262): condemning both symmetrical excesses

Seized with the accusation brought against the Alexandrian, Pope Saint Dionysius (259-268) gathers a synod in Rome around 262 and decides with a rightness that will make jurisprudence: he condemns equally the two opposite errors — that of Sabellius, who confuses the persons, and that which makes the Son a creature.^[34]

The pope then issued, in his own name and in the name of the council, a doctrinal letter — whence its description as a synodal letter — whose fragments are collected in DH 112-115. According to Chapman's summary, it declares in substance that making the Son a creature is an impiety of equal gravity, though contrary, to that of Sabellius: this is a paraphrase of his sentence, not a word-for-word quotation of the pope.^[35]

Dionysius of Alexandria answered with a Refutation and Apology in four books and was declared cleared of all suspicion.^[36] The Roman lesson is capital and holds for all centuries: faith holds the ridge between two precipices — confusing the persons on one side, dividing the substance on the other. Sabellianism and Arianism are the two slopes of the same ravine.^[37]

Saint Athanasius: naming the error by its name

In the fourth century, it is Saint Athanasius of Alexandria who deals the decisive blow to the doctrine, notably in his Discourses Against the Arians — the fourth of which directly targets the Sabellians. His method is redoubtable: he takes Scripture at its word. When Christ says "I and the Father are one" (Jn 10:30), the Sabellians triumph; but when he says "the Father is greater than I" (Jn 14:28) or prays to his Father in Gethsemane, their system collapses — who prays to whom, who sends whom, who sits at whose right hand?^[38]

Athanasius thus shows that Sabellianism can only read the Gospel by mutilating it: it retains the verses of unity and erases the verses of distinction. But faith receives the whole of Scripture — and the whole of Scripture shows a Son turning towards a Father really other than himself, from all eternity.^[39]

Saint Basil: one essence, three hypostases

Saint Basil of Caesarea, in his Letters 210, 214 and 235 around 375, confronts the Sabellians of his time and forges the instrument which definitively disarms them: the distinction between essence (ousia) — what God is, unique — and hypostases — who God is, three really subsistent persons. His formula, passed into all Eastern Catholicism, holds in six Greek words: μία οὐσία, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις — one essence, three hypostases.^[40]

Against Sabellius, the formula says exactly what is needed: unity lies on the side of essence, never at the price of the persons; distinction lies on the side of the hypostases, never at the price of unity. The Sabellian confuses the hypostases into one; the Arian divides the essence into great and small: Basil closes both exits with a single gesture.^[41]

Saint Gregory of Nyssa against the Sabellians

The brother of Basil, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, pushes the refutation to its term in his discourse Against Arius and Sabellius (Adversus Arium et Sabellium, CPG 3141). In it he targets the most developed form of the system: the idea that the whole of creation would be consummated in the return of the Logos into the Father, so that God may be all in all — the dilation followed by the final contraction.^[42]

His answer is luminous: if the Son were one day to cease being distinct from the Father, then filiation would not be eternal, and the very name of Father — which supposes a Son — would be only a provisional title of God. But the Gospel reveals a Father eternally Father: erasing the distinction at the end of time is erasing God himself.^[43]

In the fourth century, Sabellianism does not die with Sabellius: it becomes a polemical weapon. The Arians and Semi-Arians affect to be greatly afraid of it and brandish the Sabellian bogeyman against all defenders of Nicaea: whoever confesses the Son consubstantial with the Father would be a disguised Sabellian.^[44]

The Marcellus of Ancyra affair gives some colour to the accusation. This intransigent Nicene bishop develops a personal Monarchianism resembling the system of Sabellius: the Logos would be only an inner power of the Father, deployed for creation and redemption, before being reabsorbed into him. Deposed in 336, supported by Pope Julius I and then by Saint Athanasius himself, Marcellus embarrasses his own allies — and his disciple Photinus pushes the system still further, to the point of denying the pre-existence of the Word.^[45]

The lesson of the episode is twofold. On the one hand, Rome's alliance with Marcellus shows that anti-Arianism could brush against the reverse excess: by dint of pressing unity against the Arians, one risks loosening the persons. On the other hand, the Church knew how to distinguish: it never confused the clumsiness of an ally with the heresy of Sabellius, and that is why Constantinople will anathematize separately the Sabellians, the Marcellians and the Photinians — three names, three nuances, one same refusal of the real distinction of the persons.^[46]

The detail of the Arian crisis belongs to the neighbouring dossier: Arianism.

Canon 1: the Sabellians anathematized by name

One hundred and sixty years after the excommunication of Sabellius, the First Council of Constantinople, convened by Emperor Theodosius in 381, pronounces the definitive verdict. Its canon 1 confirms the faith of the 318 Fathers of Nicaea and declares anathema all heresies — expressly naming the Sabellians in the middle of the list:^[47]

"Let not the faith of the three hundred and eighteen Fathers assembled at Nicaea be set aside, but let it remain firm; and let every heresy be anathematized, particularly that of the Eunomians, the Arians, the Semi-Arians or Pneumatomachians, the Sabellians, the Marcellians, the Photinians and the Apollinarians." — First Council of Constantinople (381), canon 1^[48]

The council thus places Sabellianism at the heart of the apparatus: the error on the divine persons stands between Pneumatomachianism — which mutilates the Spirit — and Marcellianism — which is its reborn form. A century and a half of history ends in one line of anathema.^[49]

Canon 7: a baptism to be started over

The same council draws the practical consequences in its canon 7, which regulates the reception of converted heretics. The principle is simple: those whose baptism keeps the Trinitarian form — Arians, Macedonians — are received by the anointing of chrism alone; those whose error destroys the Trinity itself must be baptized as pagans. And among the latter figure by name "the Sabellians, who teach the identity of the Father and the Son".^[50]

The judgment is of a luminous severity: a baptism conferred in the name of a God without distinct persons is not a Christian baptism. Sabellianism is not one theological opinion among others — it touches the very Name into which one is plunged.^[51]

The so-called Tome of Damasus, taken up at Constantinople (382)

The sentence is confirmed by the Tome of Damasus — profession of faith of the Roman synod gathered under Pope Saint Damasus I, whose dating remains debated (around 377 according to several historians, 382 according to the traditional dating): anathema to whoever follows the error of Sabellius in saying that the same is at once Father and Son.^[52] The same formula is taken up by the synodal letter of the council of Constantinople (382), preserved by Theodoret (Ecclesiastical History, V, 11). West and East, Rome and Constantinople, now speak with a single voice: the identity of the Father and the Son is incompatible with the faith.^[53]

Against the system of Sabellius, the Catholic faith holds together the three truths which heresy dislocates: God is one, Christ is God, and the persons are really distinct. The Catechism of the Catholic Church formulates the exact antidote, in paragraph 254:^[65]

"The divine persons are really distinct from one another. God is one but not solitary. 'Father', 'Son', 'Holy Spirit' are not simply names designating modalities of the divine being, for they are really distinct from one another." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 254^[66]

Every word of this paragraph targets Sabellius: really distinct against distinction by mere appellation; not solitary against the monad dilating and contracting itself; not simply names against one hypostasis, two in name. Sixteen centuries after the excommunication of 220, the Catechism still refutes the Roman heresy — proof that the error, under new clothes, has never ceased to tempt hurried minds.^[67]

And the crowning of three centuries of controversies, the Symbol sung every Sunday, confesses the Son "true God from true God" — begotten, not disguised; distinct, not identical; eternal, not provisional.^[68]

Sabellianism never quite dies, because it is born of a good intention pushed to excess: protecting the unity of God. Every generation of hurried Christians rediscovers the same temptation — simplifying the mystery by erasing the persons. In the fourth century, these were Marcellus and Photinus; in the modern era, various Unitarianisms; in the twentieth century, the Oneness Pentecostals, who rebaptize in the name of Jesus alone (see Modalism).^[69]

The answer of the Church does not vary any more: neither confusion nor division — one God, three persons. It is the narrow ridge traced by Pope Saint Dionysius in 262, confirmed at Constantinople in 381, and which still holds.^[70]

• Modalism — Noetus, Praxeas and the Roman crisis: the mother dossier of which Sabellianism is the completed system.
• The heresies of the early centuries — the panorama of ancient errors.
• Arianism — the reverse crisis: a Son lowered to the rank of creature.
• Adoptianism — the other Monarchianism: a Christ-man adopted by God.
• Macedonianism — the crisis of the Holy Spirit, decided at the same council of 381.