Prologue to the Dialogues

Some men, distinguished neither by family nor by education, and without any of the honorable reputation that comes from an upright life, set out to win fame by wicked means. One of these was the famous Alexander the coppersmith, a man of no distinction of any kind. He had no noble birth and no gift of speech. He never led a political party or an army in the field, and he never proved himself a man in battle. Day after day he plied his shameful trade, and he won fame for nothing but his mad violence against Saint Paul. [a] Shimei, again, an obscure man of the rank of a servant, has become very well known for his brazen attack on the holy David. [b] It is also said that the man who started the Manichaean heresy was a mere slave, fit only for the whip, and that he wrote his hateful and superstitious books out of a love of being noticed. [c]

Many today follow the same course. They turn their backs on the honorable glory of virtue because of the hard work it takes to win it, and instead they buy themselves the kind of fame that comes from shame and disgrace. In their eagerness to pose as champions of new doctrines, they pick up and gather together the impiety of many heresies, and out of it they put together this deadly heresy. I will now try, briefly, to argue with them. I have two aims: to cure them of their unsoundness, if I can, and to give a word of warning to all.

I call my work “Eranistes, or Polymorphus.” For these men have gathered their harmful doctrines from many unhappy sources, and what they produce is a patchwork of ideas that do not fit together. To call our Lord Christ God only is the way of Simon, of Cerdo, of Marcion, and of others who share this abominable opinion. [d] They admit that he was born of a Virgin, but they add that this birth was only a passing through her, and that God the Word took nothing of the Virgin’s nature. That is stolen from Valentinus and Bardesanes and the followers of their fables. [f] To call the divinity and the humanity of the Lord Christ one nature is the error lifted from the follies of Apollinarius. [g] And to say that the divinity of Christ could suffer is a theft from the blasphemy of Arius and Eunomius. So the main principle of their teaching is like a beggar’s cloak, sewn together out of rags that do not match. [h]

That is why I call this work Eranistes, or Polymorphus. I will write it in the form of a dialogue, with questions and answers, propositions, solutions and counterarguments, and everything else a dialogue ought to have. I will not put the names of the questioners and of those who answer them into the body of the dialogue, as the wise Greeks of old did. Instead I will write the names at the side, at the beginning of each paragraph. They, after all, put their writings into the hands of readers who were highly and widely educated, people for whom literature was life. I, on the other hand, want the reading of what I write, and the finding of whatever good it may hold, to be easy, even for the unlearned. I think this will be made easier if the speakers are plainly shown by their names in the margin. So the debater who argues for the decrees of the apostles is called “Orthodoxos,” and his opponent “Eranistes.” A man who lives on the gifts of many we commonly call a “beggar,” and a man who knows how to pile up money we call a “Chrematistes.” So we have given our debater this name from his character and his habits. [i]

I ask everyone into whose hands my book may come to set aside every opinion formed in advance and to put the truth to the test. For the sake of clarity I will divide my book into three dialogues. The first will argue that the divinity of the only Son cannot change. The second will show, with God’s help, that the divinity and the humanity of the Lord Christ are united without being mixed together. The third will argue that the divinity of our Savior cannot suffer. After these three debates we will add several more, as a kind of completion to them, setting out formal proofs under each heading and making it perfectly plain that the teaching of the apostles is kept by us.