Against Praxeas 3

For all the simple people, not to call them unwise and uneducated, who always form the majority of believers, since the rule of faith itself transfers them from the many gods of the world to the one and true God, not understanding that he is indeed to be believed as one, but together with his economy, take fright, because they presume that the economy, with its number and arrangement of a trinity, is a division of the unity; whereas the unity, deriving the trinity from itself, is not destroyed by it but administered. So they are forever tossing it about that two and three are preached by us, while they presume that they are worshipers of one God; as if unity gathered together irrationally did not also make heresy, and trinity rationally weighed did not establish truth. “We hold the monarchy,” they say; and even Latins pronounce the very sound so vocally and so skillfully that you would think they understand the monarchy as well as they pronounce it. But I, if I have picked up anything of either language, know that monarchy means nothing else than single and unique rule; yet monarchy does not, because it belongs to one, prescribe that he whose it is should either not have a son, or have made himself his own son, or not administer his monarchy through whom he will. Indeed I say that no dominion is so much one's own, so singular, so much a monarchy, that it is not also administered through other persons closely connected with it, whom it has itself provided as its officers. And if he whose monarchy it is has a son as well, it is not at once divided and does not cease to be a monarchy if the son too is taken as a sharer in it; but it belongs chiefly to him from whom it is communicated to the son, and while it is his, it is still a monarchy, being held together by two who are so united. So if the divine monarchy too is administered through so many legions and armies of angels, as it is written, “A thousand thousands stood before him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand ministered to him,” and has not therefore ceased to belong to one, so as to cease to be a monarchy, because it is managed through so many thousands of powers: how is it that God should seem to suffer division and dispersion in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, who have been allotted the second and third place, and who are so closely sharers in the Father's substance, when he does not suffer them in so great a number of angels, and those indeed so foreign to the Father's substance? Do you reckon the members, the pledges, the instruments, the very power and entire wealth of the monarchy as its overthrow? Not rightly. I would rather you exercised yourself on the sense of the thing than on the sound of the word. For you must understand the overthrow of the monarchy to be this: when another dominion, with a condition and state of its own, and therefore a rival, is brought in over it; when another god is introduced against the Creator; then it is wrong, when there are more gods, as with the Valentinians and the Prodicians; then it is the overthrow of the monarchy, when it means the destruction of the Creator.