Burning with zeal for the oneness of God, the second wave of Monarchian heretics—branded “Patripassians” by Tertullian—pursued a paradoxical vision: to exalt the full divinity of Christ while collapsing the distinctions within the Trinity. In doing so, they dissolved the personal identity of the Son into the essence of the Father, creating a theological tempest that stirred Rome and reverberated across the early Church. These teachers, more perilous than mere rationalists, gained not only a foothold in ecclesiastical thought but, for a time, the sympathy of the Roman episcopate itself.
The Rise of Patripassian Monarchianism
The second category of Monarchians, known as Patripassians—a name coined by Tertullian to signify those who taught that the Father suffered (Pater passus)—represented a peculiar union of fervent unitarianism and unwavering devotion to the deity of Christ. In their devotion, however, they erased the independent hypostasis of the Son, insisting instead that the one God had voluntarily become man. The Incarnation, they claimed, was not the self-revelation of a distinct divine Person, but the veiling of the Father himself in flesh. To them, Christ was not another divine being alongside the Father, but the Father made visible and vulnerable.
This radical unity led them to accuse their opponents—who distinguished between Father and Son—of “ditheism.” Though often intellectually unsophisticated compared to the Gnostics, the Patripassians posed a greater pastoral threat. They multiplied in Rome, and for a season even won the ear of the Roman episcopate. Their persistence stretched into the time of Epiphanius in the late fourth century, illustrating how deeply this theological distortion took root in the Roman consciousness.
Praxeas of Asia Minor
The first herald of this theology was Praxeas, a figure from Asia Minor who arrived in Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, bearing the reputation of a confessor. He is credited with influencing Bishop Victor to condemn Montanism and promoting his own Patripassian views in the process. According to the fierce polemics of Tertullian, Praxeas accomplished a twofold work of the devil in Rome: he expelled the Holy Spirit and crucified the Father.
Praxeas leaned heavily upon select scriptural verses—Isaiah 45:5, John 10:30 (“I and the Father are one”), and John 14:9 (“He who has seen me has seen the Father”)—treating them as if they alone comprised the entire biblical witness. On this fragile foundation, he constructed the notion that the Father himself had assumed flesh, suffered, and died. While he tried to soften the claim by distinguishing between pati (to suffer) and copati (to sympathize), the result was the same: the obliteration of the Son’s personal distinctiveness.
To Praxeas, the Father and Son were not two hypostases but two modes of the same divine being—Spirit and flesh in a single subject. He viewed orthodox trinitarian doctrine as a betrayal of monotheism, accusing the Church of tritheism. Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean, composed around 210, remains the chief source for Praxeas’ views, though oddly, Hippolytus omits any mention of him. This absence has prompted some scholars to speculate that Praxeas might be a pseudonym or identical with figures such as Noëtus or Callistus.
Noëtus of Smyrna
About the year 200, Noëtus of Smyrna echoed the same doctrine, buttressing his teaching with Romans 9:5, where Christ is called “God over all.” When summoned by a local council for censure, Noëtus defended himself by claiming he was magnifying Christ’s glory rather than diminishing it. His line of thought appears intertwined with the pantheistic philosophy of Heraclitus, according to the Philosophumena. Heraclitus saw the cosmos as the unity of opposites—dissolvable and indissoluble, mortal and immortal—and Noëtus, inspired by this worldview, envisioned the divine subject as one who harmonized all contraries, including suffering and impassibility.
His disciples, Epigonus and Cleomenes, carried this doctrine into the heart of Rome. Under the indulgence of Pope Zephyrinus, they found fertile ground for their teaching, which continued to gather influence.
Callistus and the Roman Papacy
Callistus—who ascended to the Roman bishopric as Pope Calixtus I—did not merely tolerate this theology; he advanced it. He espoused the notion that the Son was nothing more than the Father manifested in human form. Just as the soul animates the body, the Father was said to animate the Son and suffer through him. “The Father,” declared Callistus, “who was in the Son, took flesh and made it divine, uniting it with himself.” Thus, “Father” and “Son” were but names of a single divine person; hence, the Father suffered with the Son.
To his opponents, this was heresy, a blurring of distinctions vital to the faith. They labeled him and his adherents “Callistians,” while he denounced them as “ditheists.” Hippolytus, the chief critic and theological rival of Callistus, records these tensions in the ninth book of his Philosophumena. Yet it is worth noting that Hippolytus himself leaned toward the opposite extreme of subordinationism—overstressing the difference between the divine Persons. He painted Callistus in lurid colors, accusing him of heretical inconsistency and ambition.
Callistus’ formula, however, was not a crude conflation of the Father and the Son. He rejected both the strict separation of the Logos and the Sabellian confusion. Instead, he hinted at a deeper union—the perichōrēsis, or mutual indwelling of the divine Persons. In this sense, Callistus may be viewed as a theological bridge, attempting to lead Roman Monarchianism toward the orthodoxy later enshrined at Nicaea. Yet his language lacked precision and consistency, and he failed to escape accusations from both extremes. Ultimately, he excommunicated both Sabellius and Hippolytus. The Roman Church rallied behind him, and history enshrined him as a prominent early pope, despite the controversies of his reign (218–223 or 224).
Beryllus of Bostra
Beryllus, bishop of Bostra in Arabia Petraea, represents a more obscure and transitional figure in this development. His teachings are known primarily through a brief and enigmatic report in Eusebius. Beryllus denied the personal pre-existence and independent divinity of Christ, but affirmed that the divine essence of the Father dwelled within him during his earthly ministry. In this view, he stood between pure Patripassianism and the modalism of Sabellius, forming a conceptual link in the evolving Christological debates.
His doctrine came under scrutiny at an Arabian synod in 244, where none other than Origen was summoned to assist. At this time, Origen himself was under suspicion, but nevertheless he succeeded in persuading Beryllus of the errors in his view—especially concerning the humanity of Christ. Beryllus had likely displaced the human soul of Christ with what he conceived as the indwelling divinity of the Father, a move that anticipated, in a way, the later christological formulations of Apollinaris. Graciously, Beryllus accepted Origen’s correction and thanked him for the enlightenment.
This rare moment of theological reconciliation stands out as a luminous instance of genuine intellectual and spiritual concord in the midst of doctrinal strife.
Historical Reflection
The Patripassian controversy reveals the profound struggle of the early Church to articulate a mystery that defies reduction: the triunity of God manifest in the singular Person of Jesus Christ. These Monarchians were driven not by a desire to undermine Christ’s divinity, but to exalt it—yet in doing so, they sacrificed the internal plurality that gives coherence to the gospel itself.
Their legacy is not merely one of error, but of provocation. They forced the Church to refine her understanding, to labor toward clearer language and deeper truth. The early debates were not distractions from the faith but the crucible in which orthodoxy was forged.
In their fervor, the Patripassians bore witness to the divine paradox at the heart of Christian confession—God in flesh, the infinite become finite, the immortal embracing death. But without the eternal distinction of Persons, the gospel collapses into a tragic soliloquy. Thus, from Praxeas to Callistus to Beryllus, the Church was led—by argument, excommunication, and even conversion—toward the luminous clarity of the Nicene faith.
