These related movements were, collectively, an early way in which Christians tried to reconcile the nature of the Godhead, being comprised of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Those who espoused them saw them as a rational, sensible conclusion; but as it turns out, the bulk of Christendom disagreed.
Although the details of these movements’ thinking varied, essentially they all boiled down to the same fundamental conception of God existing as a unitary being which manifested or behaved in three particular variations. Ultimately this thinking clashed with what eventually became the Trinity doctrine which viewed those three manifestations or variant presentations of God as distinct, unitary “persons” of their own, but with all three being united as a single Godhead.
Granted, the Trinity doctrine as such was not fleshed out until the 4th century, and wasn’t formally propounded until the First Council of Constantinople in 381, but various sentiments along the lines of eventual Trinitarianism already existed as early as the 2nd century.
In short, something of a contest brewed, between these two camps, for quite some time, only occasionally coming to the surface until the great Christological rifts opened up in the early 4th century.
Perhaps the earliest explicit modalist we have a record of, is a priest from Anatolia named Praxeas, who later went to Rome then Carthage. According to his opponent Tertullian (who wrote a tract against him, Adversus Praxean), Praxeas taught that dividing God into three beings was blasphemous. Also according to Tertullian, Praxeas was an ardent anti-Montanist and had done quite a bit to organize the rest of the Church against that movement.
Assuming Praxeas existed and had taught what Tertullian claimed, it’s possible his modalist views had been an anti-Montanist propaganda tactic. Montanists, of course, spoke often of the nature and actions of the Paraclete, aka the Holy Spirit. By declaring the Holy Spirit merely one manifestation of a singular God rather than a divine agent with its own nature and operation, Praxeas may have been trying to dismiss the Holy Spirit-generated “prophecies” taught by Montanists.
While Tertullian offered a number of critiques of Praxeas’s teaching, one of them was the implication that God the Father had suffered on the cross and died due to crucifixion. This was, to him, an outrageous notion that no sane Christian could possibly accept. It’s from this implication that the term “patripassianism” came about; it derives from the Latin pater (“father”) and passio (“suffering”).
According to Tertullian, Praxeas ultimately repented and disavowed his modalist ideas. He doesn’t appear to have established any kind of movement, so his line of modalist thinking died out at the time he converted away from it.
Probably overlapping slightly with Praxeas, but having no direct connection to him that we know of aside from a similarity in their teachings, was another priest named Sabellius. He was from Libya in northern Africa, but like Praxeas, had somehow ended up in Rome where his ideas became known.
While Praxeas’s formulation was relatively simple, Sabellius’s approach was slightly more sophisticated. He added the element of time to his vision of how the three members of the Godhead had operated, as a kind of explanation or justification for how they appeared, to humanity, as three different entities. God, Sabellius taught, had progressed through the three “modes” of being, through the eons. The idea that God had changed, over time — from the creator Father to the redeeming Son to the enlightening Holy Spirit — was objectionable to many other Christians at the time.
Interestingly, Sabellius reportedly had used the Greek word ‘ομοουσιος (homoousios) to explain his view of the structure of the Godhead. A century later, St Athanasius would use the very same word to justify the opposing Trinitarian doctrine. Suffice it to say, both men may have used the same word, but they applied it in a very different manner.
Sabellius used the Sun as a kind of analogue for his model of the Godhead. The Sun had three chief properties — it gave off light, it gave off warmth, and it had a fixed circular form. In a similar way, the Son (i.e. Jesus of Nazareth) provided illumination; the Holy Spirit provided inspiration; and the Father gave form to God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were the three “faces” of the deity.
Unlike Praxeas, Sabellius never relented in what he taught. He was excommunicated by Pope Calixtus in 220 CE. However, while it is known that he had followers, none of them were reported to have been excommunicated or disciplined in any way. Also, while Praxeas’s teachings died out when he converted away from them, Sabellianism persisted. Epiphanius of Salamis, writing in the late 4th century, claimed that there were Sabellians in his time in places as far from each other as Mesopotamia and the environs of Rome.
Yet another modalist who may have overlapped a bit with Sabellius was another Anatolian priest, named Noetus, who’d made his way to Rome. The heretic-hunter Hippolytus of Rome reports he taught his own form of Patripassianism. The innovation he introduced into this perspective was to assert that the Son (i.e. Jesus of Nazareth) was the visible manifestation of God the Father, and the Holy Spirit was an invisible manifestation of him following Jesus’s ascension.
All of this is very much in line with Sabellius’s time-dimensional way of separating the three persons of the Godhead, but as with Praxeas before him, there’s nothing that suggests Noetus had been aware of Sabellius. Also, there’s no record of any action being taken against Noetus. And there’s no evidence his teachings had any lasting effect on Christianity (as had those of Sabellius, which endured for at least a couple centuries after his own time).
That only one of these modalist teachers (i.e. Sabellius) was disciplined by the Church shows that these types of teachings had little real effect on Christendom as a whole. As has been explained at length, the Trinity doctrine did not emerge explicitly until the late 4th century; but prior to that, Christian thinking had largely been moving in that direction for quite some time.
Based on what the various Church Fathers have to say, the idea that God the Father suffered and died on the cross was a serious stumbling block for many early Christians. It was something they couldn’t fathom … even if they also viewed God as a single being, yet one of their core beliefs was that Jesus of Nazareth was also God who’d died on the cross and had been resurrected.
Most extant Christian sects descend from those which had participated in the First Council of Constantinople in 381 and adopted what is viewed as a the Trinity doctrine. They reject any conception of the three persons of the Godhead as mere manifestations, appearances, or “modes” of the singular Deity. As this doctrine teaches, God is unified as one Being but exists as three distinct Persons and those Persons have individual natures and reality.
It was that Council that acted as the figurative nail in the coffin of modalist viewpoints. Ironically, though, if you speak to the average Christian lay person, s/he would very likely agree with the idea that the three Persons of the Godhead are simply different ways in which the unitary God interacts with humanity. That goes to show how well the Trinity doctrine is understood by followers of Christianity … which is to say, most of them don’t actually understand it in any meaningful detail.
Early Christians are no different. They wrestled often with the inherent irrationality of the explicit premises on which their religion was based. But it wasn’t only early Christians who did so; even in the 21st century there are some Christian sects (e.g. Oneness Pentecostalism) which have modalist doctrines and provide teachings which are essentially modern variations of what Praxeas, Sabellius, etc. had offered.
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