[f. TRI- + THEIST; cf. F. trithéiste (Littré).] A believer in three Gods; esp. one who holds that the three Persons of the Trinity are three distinct Gods.
Chiefly in controversial use; applied spec. to a sect of Monophysites in the sixth century who denied the consubstantiality of the three Persons of the Trinity.
1608. Willet, Hexapla Exod., 323. They which hold not the distinction of three persons onely, but the diuision also of the substance, as the Tritheists.
1715. Wodrow Corr. (1843), II. 17. Roell is not thought Arian or Socinian in the great point of the Deity of Christ, but rather a Tritheist.
1811. Morning Chron., 28 Feb., 3/4. Amid the discordant tenets of the innumerable sects into which the Church is divided, the absurdities of Tritheists, and the blasphemies of Socinians, where are we to find the plain doctrines of him who declared that the Father and He are ONE, and that on the love of God and our neighbour hang all the law and the prophets?
1850. Robertson, Serm., Ser. III. iv. (1872), 45. There are in almost every congregation … Trinitarians who are practically Tri-theists, worshipping three gods.
1903. H. L. Goudge, 1 Cor., Introd. 30. S. Paul certainly is no Tritheist; the Son and the Spirit never obscure the Father for a moment.
Hence Tritheistic, Tritheistical adjs., of, pertaining to, or believing tritheism.
1698. South, Serm., III. Ded. A iv b. Reprinting exploded Tritheistick Notions.
1708. H. Dodwell, Nat. Mort. Hum. Souls, 44. Our Adversaries will appear to be the Tritheistical Gobarus’s, as to this Particular of the Heresies then condemned in the Tritheists.
1822. T. Jefferson, Writ. (1830), IV. 354. Missionaries … from the tritheistical school of Andover.
1827. Arnold, in Life & Corr. (1844), I. ii. 50. The tritheistic notions of the Trinity.
