Scotus Academicus, Tomus tertius: De adorando divinae Trinitatis mysterio

In the year of Christ 57. Simon, Magus in surname no less than in practice, prince of the heretics, among other things said that he was God, who appeared in Samaria as the Father, in Judea as the Son, among the Gentiles as the Holy Spirit.

In the year of Christ 167. The Gnostics, with Carpocrates as their author, or, according to others, Nicolas, according to some even Valentinus, taught a duality, not of Persons, but of natures in the Divine.

In the year of Christ 180. The Montanists, on the contrary, asserted in God a unity not of Essence alone, but of Person.

In the year of Christ 200. Praxeas thought that one God was to be believed in no other way than if one called the very same one both Father and Son and Holy Spirit.

In the year of Christ 219. Hermogenes posited in God only one Person.

In the year of Christ 220. Montanus the Phrygian (whence the Cataphrygians) taught and boasted that he was the Paraclete: and (what you would marvel at) he persuaded so great a man, Tertullian, of such great madness.

In the year of Christ 230. Arius, deacon of Alexandria, taught that the Son of God is a creature; that He is not co-eternal with the Father, nor co-essential; and the same a fortiori regarding the Holy Spirit.

In the year of Christ 250. Noetus denied the number of the persons, saying that the same one, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, suffered and was born in the flesh.

In the year of Christ 350. The Donatists, although of the same substance, nevertheless said that the Son and the Holy Spirit were lesser than the Father.

In the year of Christ 360. Marcellus and Photinus taught that God is singular, and, after the manner of the Jews, that there are not three Persons, but only one, although there are three names.

In the year of Christ 361. Macedonius taught that the Holy Spirit is a creature; that He has nothing in common with the Father or the Son, but is only their minister.

In the year of Christ 370. The Eunomians believed that in the Trinity there are three different substances and qualities, like gold, silver and bronze; and that the Father indeed made the Son, and again that the Son, who is a creature, made the Holy Spirit.

In the year of Christ 375. Apollinaris of Laodicea, more suited to poetry and tropes than to theology, taught that the divine Persons are unequal: namely, that the Holy Spirit is great, the Son greater, the Father greatest.

In the year of Christ 400. Faustus the Manichaean: We worship, he says, one divinity under a threefold appellation; but we believe that the Father dwells in the highest and inaccessible light; the Son abides in this second light, whose power is in the Sun, whose wisdom in the Moon; the seat of the Holy Spirit, we acknowledge, is the whole circuit of the World.

In the year of Christ 430. Theodorus of Mopsuestia and Nestorius, while they impiously deny that the Son of God was born of the Virgin, yet do not deny that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, or that He assumed a true man; they bring in a quaternity instead of the Trinity.

In the year of Christ 500. The Emperor Anastasius decreed that not a Trinity, but a quaternity, was to be adored; for which sacrilege, struck by lightning, he perished.

In the year of Christ 570. Chilperic, King of the Franks, wishing to promulgate the Sabellian heresy, wrote to the bishops of Gaul that, with the Trinity cast aside, they should say there is only one God, asserting that the same one is the Father, who is also the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In the year of Christ 600. John Philoponus, author of the Tritheites, taught that the three divine Persons are three Gods.

In the year of Christ 620. The Severians say that one is the Father, another the Son, and another the Paraclete, namely the Holy Spirit: but that each of these is not by himself a nature, but they have a common God, or a Deity existing in them, and that, participating in that Deity in an indivisible manner, each one is God.

In the year of Christ 630. Mahomet posits one God, the author of the Universe, who was neither begotten nor begot. He denies the Trinity in unity, and confesses only a binary number, namely the divine essence itself and its soul.

In the year of Christ 1000. Lorsius and Heribertus said that whatever is written in the Old and New Testament about the Trinity and the unity of God is raving madness.

In the year of Christ 1049. About two hundred years before this year, in the time of Pope Nicholas I., the Greeks began a schism; but around this time they separated themselves openly and publicly from the Roman Church, and began to spread the error concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone.

In the year of Christ 1050. Bogomiles, who was burned in the theater by the Emperor Alexius Comnenus, taught that there is no Trinity in God.

In the year of Christ 1140. Peter Abelard and Arnold of Brescia taught that there are unequal grades in the divine; that God the Father is full power, both in generating and in distinguishing: the Son a certain power in distinguishing through wisdom; the Holy Spirit no power at all, but benignity.

In the year of Christ 1190. Joachim the Abbot taught that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one essence; but that a unity of this kind is not proper and true, but as it were collective and figurative, just as many faithful are one Church, so that the essence would be a fourth thing.

In the year of Christ 1198. The followers of Marcellus, Photinus and Sophronius, not confessing the Holy Trinity, but calling the Spirit alone God, said that His Word was an efficacy, which had dwelt in the one born of the seed of David, not a substance which has its own hypostasis.

Coming now to our own heretics, who are not a little more insolent than the earlier ones, I shall also bring forward their very words, lest anyone doubt that they have burst forth into these blasphemies against God and His most holy Trinity.

In the year of Christ 1520. Therefore Erasmus of Rotterdam, who in most places preferred to be seen as a Catholic rather than to be one, says that the Arians, that is, the asserters of the inequality of the divine Persons, did not so much commit heresy as schism, since they were (he says) equal to us in number, superior in eloquence and learning.

In the year of Christ 1530. Martin Luther: If my soul hates the word homoousion and I am unwilling to use it, I shall not be a heretic. Nor is there any reason for you to object to me that it was received against the Arians; it was not received.

In the year of Christ 1540. Michael Servetus denies that those three incorporeal things, distinct in one Deity, can subsist; he calls all who place the Trinity in the essence of God Tritheites and atheists, who have no God unless one that is tripartite and aggregated. Indeed, on the testimony of Theodorus, he called the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit a three-headed Cerberus.

In the year of Christ 1545. John Calvin: Would that the names of Trinity, Person, Consubstantial were buried. And elsewhere: One God, that is, the Trinity: You believe in God, that is, in the Trinity: this we reject not only as insipid, but also as profane.

In the year of Christ 1550. Valentinus Gentilis: The confusion of the three into one and the same spirit in number was the foundation and origin of all errors. For whoever distinguishes one God into three Persons either makes illusions for himself, or necessarily divides and tears apart the substance of the one God.

Wolfgangus Musculus: I would not wish, before pagans, to call the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit three Persons, lest I seem to be saying three Gods: this word person is not so necessary to the Christian faith, since the first Christians did not know it.

In the year of Christ 1560. Theodore Beza: The Word of God clearly teaches us that this divine essence is distinct really and in truth, and from eternity, into three Persons.

Lambert Daneau: That prayer, in which we say in the Litany, Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us, is inept, insane, badly invented by the Fathers, and dangerous.

George Blandrata calls the Creed of Athanasius the Creed of Satan.

In the year of Christ 1580. Christian Franck: What sort of men those were by whom the dogma of the Trinity was most eagerly received, approved and sown abroad, no one is ignorant: for it is certain that they, more than all others, were imbued with the custom of worshipping a multitude of Gods; of the greater, such as Apollo and Mars, and of the lesser, such as Castor and Jupiter. From this most wicked fountain of Gods there flowed into the Christian world both countless Saints, to be invoked as lesser Gods, and even the three divine Persons, to be adored as greater Gods.

In the year of Christ 1582. Theodosius Schimberg: It is manifest that the Trinity and the divinity of the Son are not true articles of faith, because they are impossibilities of the world. Therefore in reality they are blasphemous and horrendous dogmas, thrust upon the Churches out of the lowest Orcus by the son of perdition through the power of Satan. The false and fictitious God of the son of perdition is the one God who is three; for this one is God in name only, but in reality itself an idol.

In the year of Christ 1590. Theodore Dorcius: This false and fictitious God of the man of sin is three and one: for this one is God in name only, but in reality an idol, of whom Paul says that he is nothing. For it is altogether impossible that anyone existing in such a way, who is one and three, could or ought to be true God. For the true God is not of such great power that He could make those things really exist which are impossible to the mind.

In the year of Christ 1590. Francis David: I say, therefore, that Christ the man is not that most high Jesus, but His Son: the Father, the most high God, we alone call God of Himself; but the Son we call God by communication. The same author elsewhere: If Christ is to be adored and invoked, Christ will be that only true God set before us. Deut. 6. But that has already long ago been denied and destroyed by us. We cannot, therefore, say and affirm that Christ is to be adored and invoked, unless we wish to be transgressors.

Finally, the Family of Love denies that Christ is equal to the Father. It says that the Holy Spirit is not God, and that whatever the Papists believe about the Holy Spirit, whether concerning His essence or His Deity, is a phantom.

There are also several other men of darkness of a less well-known name, who have attempted to obscure the adorable mystery of the Trinity with their ravings and errors. These, being worthy of perpetual silence, I willingly pass over in silence.