Novatian (c. 210–280) was a highly educated priest, theologian, and writer. His work, On the Trinity, advances beyond the Trinitarian theology of Tertullian’s earlier thought in maintaining the eternal Sonship of Christ. Novatian initiated conceptualizing the metaphysics of the Incarnation, through the doctrine of Trinitarian circumincession, which in later theology came to be referred to as the ‘hypostatic union’ of the natures in the person of Christ and the ‘communication of idioms’ between the natures. The aim of this article is to explore some areas of Novatian’s thought on the essence and attributes of God, his deployment of divine ( apophatic ) grammar, his understanding of the use anthropomorphic language in Scripture, the normative assumption of the simplicity of God in his theology (anachronistically speaking), his response to some objections to the hypostatic union, and a few elegantly written reflections on the Spirit. Novatian divides his treatise up