assumed the flesh, deified it by uniting it with Himself, and made it one, so that the Father and Son are called one God, while this person being one cannot be two, and so the Father suffered along with the Son.” Hippolytus adds that Callistus worked out this form of statement because he did not “wish to say the Father suffered.” The point here, therefore, is that the Son differs from the Father not as the incarnate differs from the unincarnate God, but rather as the incarnating man differs from the incarnated Spirit. As then the flesh is properly designated by the “Son” and it is the flesh that suffers, the Father, who is properly the Spirit incarnated in the “Son,” may more exactly be said to have suffered along with the flesh, i.e., the “Son,” than Himself to have endured the suffering. The suffering was, in other words, in the “flesh”: the informing “Spirit” only partook in the suffering of the “flesh” because joined in personal union with it. The artificiality of this construction is manifest on the face of it; as also is its instability. Hippolytus himself pointed out its evident tendency to fall back into the lower dynamistic Monarchianism; since in proportion as the Father as the Spirit and the Son as the flesh were separated in thought, the reality of the incarnation was likely to give way in favor of a more or less clearly conceived inhabitation. Thus Jesus would become again only a man in whom God dwelt. The formula of “the Father suffering with the Son” was really, therefore, a mediation toward humanitarianism rather than toward full recognition of the deity of the Son; and it is interesting to observe in the later Arians the reëmergence of the mode of expression thus struck out by Callistus. With them of course it was not a question of the Father but of that “Middle Being” which they called the Son of God; but what they affirm of it is that having taken “man” from the Virgin Mary, it “shared in” the sufferings of this “man” on the cross.[1] The obvious meaning of the Arians will throw light back upon the idea which Callistus meant to convey. This was clearly that the incarnation of the Spirit which was God in the man which was Christ, brought that Spirit into definite relations to the sufferings endured by this man properly in his flesh.
What it concerns us to note here particularly, however, is that it is just this Callistan formula which underlies the Monarchianism
- ↑ At the Synod of Sirmium, 357. See Hahn 3, § 161. The idea is that the “man” alone “suffers” (patitur): the Logos incarnate in the “man” only co-suffers (compatitur) with it. The Spirit, say the Arians at Sardica, 343, “did not suffer, but the man (άνθρωπος) which it put on suffered”; because, as it is immediately explained, this is “capable of suffering.” Cf. Hahn 3, p. 189.
