Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Simple people — I will not say imprudent and uneducated ones, who nevertheless always make up the greater part of believers — since the very rule of faith itself leads them away from the many gods of this world to the one true God, and since they do not understand that this "one" is to be believed in together with his own economy, take fright at the economy itself. They assume that the trinity's number and arrangement splits the unity apart, whereas the unity, by producing a trinity from itself, is not destroyed thereby but administered thereby. And so they keep going about saying that we preach two gods, or even three, while they themselves imagine they are the worshippers of one God — as if a unity irrationally assembled did not itself make a heresy, and a trinity rationally reckoned did not itself constitute the truth! [2] "We hold to the Monarchy," they say — and even the Latin-speakers among them mouth the very sound of the word so skillfully that you would think they understood "monarchy" as well as they pronounce it! But while the Latins are eager to sound out "monarchy," even the Greeks are unwilling to understand "economy." Yet I, if I have picked up anything of either language, know that "monarchy" signifies nothing other than a single, sole rule; it does not, however, rule out the idea that the one whose rule it is might also have a son, or that he might not have made himself his own son, or that he might not administer his own monarchy through whomever he pleases. On the contrary, I say that no single power belongs so entirely, so exclusively, so much as a monarchy to one person alone that it cannot also be administered through other persons closely attached to it, whom it has itself appointed as its officials: [3] and if there should indeed be a son belonging to the one whose monarchy it is, that does not mean the monarchy is at once divided and ceases to be a monarchy, just because a son is taken in as a sharer in it; rather, it belongs, first and foremost, to the one from whom it is shared with the son, and while it remains his, it is still a monarchy, since it is held jointly by two who are so united. [4] So then, if the divine monarchy is itself administered through so many legions and armies of angels, as it is written — "a thousand thousands ministered to him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him" — and it did not for that reason cease to belong to one alone, so that it should cease to be a monarchy because it is managed through so many thousands of powers, [5] how can it be imagined that God undergoes partition and scattering in a Son and a Holy Spirit, who are allotted second and third place, sharers as they are in the very substance of the Father — a thing he does not suffer to happen even with such a vast number of angels, alien as they are to the Father's substance? Do you reckon the overthrow of his monarchy to consist in his own members, pledges, instruments, and indeed the whole force and total wealth of that monarchy? Not rightly so. [6] I would rather you train yourself to attend to the sense of the matter than to the mere sound of the word. For the overthrow of a monarchy is properly understood by you to occur when another power of its own separate standing and status is set up as a rival to it — when another god is brought in against the Creator, as with Marcion, or several gods, as with the followers of Valentinus and Prodicus: that is the overthrow of a monarchy, precisely because it is the destruction of the Creator.