Against Praxeas

Praxeas, according to Tertullian, came to Rome from Asia and taught that Father, Son and Spirit are one and the same, so that the Father himself was born of Mary and suffered. Nothing else is known of him. Tertullian answers that the one God exists in an ordered “economy” of three, and he supplies Latin terms for saying so: the unity is distributed into a Trinity (trinitas), the three are “of one substance” (unius substantiae) (2), and one is distinct from another “on the ground of Personality, not of Substance” (personae non substantiae nomine) (12).

The work belongs to Tertullian’s later years, after he had taken the side of the New Prophecy. He says so himself: he and his friends “withdrew from the carnally-minded” over their acknowledgment of the Paraclete (1). The same chapter is the only source for the report that a bishop of Rome, whom Tertullian does not name, first recognised the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca and Maximilla and then withdrew his letter of peace at Praxeas’s urging. Tertullian is a partisan in both disputes, and writes more than a generation after the Roman episode. The treatise carries no date; it is usually placed in the 210s.