In the second century Montanus
the Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting in his
single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single
ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the present day
many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself, is incarnate
in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this
belief to its logical conclusion by adoring each other. Tertullian
records that this was done by his fellow-Christians at Carthage in
the second century; the disciples of St. Columba worshipped him as
an embodiment of Christ; and in the eighth century Elipandus of
Toledo spoke of Christ as "a god among gods," meaning that all
believers were gods just as truly as Jesus himself. The adoration of
each other was customary among the Albigenses, and is noticed
hundreds of times in the records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in
the early part of the fourteenth century.
In the thirteenth century there arose a sect called the Brethren and
Sisters of the Free Spirit, who held that by long and assiduous
contemplation any man might be united to the deity in an ineffable
manner and become one with the source and parent of all things, and
that he who had thus ascended to God and been absorbed in his
beatific essence, actually formed part of the Godhead, was the Son
of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself, and enjoyed
thereby a glorious immunity from the trammels of all laws human and
divine.
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