Syriac Patrology, Volume 3: The Book of Steps

PRAEFATIO — CAPUT III. / DE DOCTRINA LIBRI GRADUUM — I. DE DEO UNO AC TRINO.

XXVI / XXVII

is founded, Abba Father, as the first divine person, differs in nothing from the Bar Son, that is, from the second divine person. The Author speaks openly on this matter only once: in Sermon XX, 12, he says the Lord and the Father are in one another and are one, and the Holy Spirit is in them¹. By themselves, these words admit an orthodox sense and can be understood in terms of the perichoresis the mutual interpenetration of the divine persons. However, the matter is hardly as plain as it appears at first glance. For in Sermon IX, 15, he says God was reconciled to the human race, because the Lord (Marya Lord, that is, Christ) is announced in the creature, which either confesses the Father, or confesses the Son, or the Holy Spirit, although not all are pure in faith². Now, indeed, the particle au or, by which the names of the three persons are disjoined in the quoted passage, implies in the obvious sense that all parts of the disjunction are of the same power, or in other words, that it returns to the same thing, whether the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit be the object of confession or faith, as the context teaches.

Two things in particular suggest a link between the trinitarian doctrine of the Book of Steps and the Sabellian heresy. Indeed, as Saint Epiphanius testifies, the Sabellians drew the arguments for their doctrine from certain apocryphal writings, and especially from the Gospel which is called "according to the Egyptians"³. The Book of Steps, Sermon XXVI, alleges a certain spurious document, akin to the Syriac Testament of Adam, in which we detect Sabellian ideas. Furthermore, it is notable that the Book of Steps, Sermon XXIX, 19, uses the word trinity tlitayuta in a completely Sabellian sense, just as Epiphanius reports this same thing regarding the sect of the Sabellians, who, by his testimony, taught that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, just as body, soul, and spirit exist in one man, so that the Father is like the body, the Son like the soul, and finally the Spirit is considered in the divinity itself like the human spirit⁴. The Book of Steps, conversely, teaches in the aforementioned place that man, having received the Paraclete, consists of three parts: namely, body,

He wishes [to say] according to the words of Ps. XCVIII, 1, that the Lord did not need a helper. — See also Sermon XXII, 7, 9, 10, 12; XXIII, 11.

¹ And this teacher of the book (i.e., the Lord) [says] that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one and of one kind. A later author in the time of the Christological controversies would hardly have dared to write that the Lord is one (i.e., one person) with the Father, as had one implies, but would have written hda one nature, one thing. In truth, the words Father and Son are missing in the manuscript; the scribe seems to have omitted those words to save the orthodoxy of the assertion.

² Just as the Lord is preached in all creation, so that wherever the human race exists, they either confess the Father, or confess the Son, or confess the Holy Spirit. And even if not all are in the purity of faith, yet just as this Name is preached, the earth shall be satisfied. It is to be regretted that this text exists in only one manuscript, A, which in this place is hardly free from errors: at least the words or the Father... or the Son are quite obscure, just as if something had fallen out before just as.

³ Haer. LXXII, 2: They derive their entire error and the power of their error from certain apocryphal writings, and especially from the so-called Gospel of the Egyptians, to which some have given this name.

⁴ Haer. LXII, 1: For he (namely, Sabellius) and those who follow him, the Sabellians, dogmatize that the Father is the same, the Son is the same, the Holy Spirit is the same; so that there are three designations in one substance, or as in a man, body and soul and spirit. And the body is, so to speak, the Father; the soul, so to speak, the Son; and the Spirit, as of a man, so also is the Holy Spirit in the divinity.

soul, and spirit, and that by this reason, having attained perfection, one is established in the trinity tlitayuta. The Author therefore uses the theological terms of the Sabellians, which, considering the remaining passages breathing the errors of the Sabellians, seems hardly to have happened by blind chance; for the passages cited above are best explained if the Author conceived the persons of the Holy Trinity as mere prosopa persons/masks of one and the same divine nature manifesting itself in a diverse way, yet lacking personal subsistence, as it is abundantly certain that the Sabellians taught¹.

But other reasons also suggest that the Book of Steps teaches Sabellian errors.

Indeed, it is established by the testimony of Saint Epiphanius that the Sabellian heresy numbered many followers in Mesopotamia², certainly among the Syrians, who at that time were the only ones there devoted to Christianity. Of even greater importance is the testimony of Marutha, bishop of Maypherqat, who, it is said, translated the canons of the Council of Nicaea into the Syriac language and prefixed to them a brief preface, which, besides the names of the bishops who were present at the Nicene Synod and the history of monastic affairs, also contains a succinct catalog of oriental heresies. Abraham Ecchellensis long ago edited this preface, translated into Latin and Arabic text³, which most likely flowed from the original Syriac text; the collection of canons itself, together with the preface, once written in Syriac, has not yet been edited in its entirety, but exists in Syriac Codex K. VI. 3 of the Library of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, from which it was edited in German by O. Braun⁴; A. Harnack reprinted the heresiological treatise, amended from the edition of O. Braun⁵, and declared it a genuine work of Marutha⁶.

Finally, the Patriarch of the Syrians, Ignatius Ephraem II Rahmani, very recently in the fourth fascicle of his Syriac Studies⁷, from the same Borgian codex (now No. 82)

¹ Cf. SCHWANE, History of Dogma. Freiburg in Br., 1892, ed. II, vol. I, p. 141. HARNACK, History of Dogma. Freiburg in Br., 1894, ed. III, vol. I, p. 723. HILGENFELD, History of Heresies of Primitive Christianity. Leipzig, 1884, p. 615 sqq. — Notable also is the consensus of the places where the works of Christ are attributed to God, with the patripassian interpolations of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs (Simeon 6₃, Issachar 7₇, Dan 5₁₃, Naphtali 8₃, Asher 7₃, Benjamin 10₇₋₉; for the Greek text of these passages, see SCHÜRER, History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ⁴, vol. III. Leipzig, 1909, p. 342 sq., n. 85) and with the usage of the Monarchian Prologues (concerning which see CORSSEN, Monarchian Prologues to the Four Gospels in Texts and Investigations, ed. GEBHARDT and HARNACK, vol. XV, fasc. I, p. 24 sqq.).

² Haer. LXII, 1: There are many of this same dogma in Mesopotamia and in the parts of Rome, being carried away by some madness.

³ MANSI, The Most Ample Collection of All Councils, vol. II, 1056 sqq.

⁴ On the Holy Nicene Synod in Church Historical Studies, ed. Knöpfler, Schrörs, Sdralek. Münster, 1898, p. 12. See below p. 118.

⁵ The Heretic-Catalog of Bishop Maruta of Maipherkat in Texts and Investigations, N. S., vol. IV, part I, 6. — ⁶ O. c. p. 4.

⁷ Documents Concerning Ancient Heresies. Patriarchal Press at the Sharf Monastery on Mount Lebanon, year MCMIX, p. 78 and T.