Chalcidius's Commentary on Plato's Timaeus

these pieces of evidence seem, in their entirety, to fully justify the conclusion that Chalcidius was neither a pagan nor a Jew, but a Christian. Gerardus Vossius, Brucker, Fabricius, Martin, and Wrobel are of the same opinion. To invalidate the objections raised by Mosheim, Brucker clarifies his position more precisely as follows: "We do not believe Chalcidius was removed from the profession of the Christian religion, but rather that he was of that type of Christian who, although they professed the name of the holy Christian faith, followed the Platonic doctrine—or rather the chaos of the Alexandrians—more than the Christian one, and preferred these impure puddles to the springs of the purest truth."

Regarding his errors, Brucker rightly refers to other men from Christian antiquity (e.g., Origen) who also did not always teach correctly. If he ultimately reveals his Christian standpoint so little, this can be sufficiently explained, as Caspar Barth and Brucker believe, by the intention to conceal his position as much as possible so that his work might find distribution in pagan schools. I would not readily agree with this latter view, as his work was too insignificant to find great attention among the scholars of his time. Also, I will leave open whether the "discipline of the secret" Arkandisciplin the practice of keeping certain doctrines hidden from the uninitiated of the Christians caused him to mask his position. In any case, his reticence is sufficiently explained only by the dependent character of his writing. The same circumstance allows us to gain another explanation for his deviations from the Christian faith, as these are not original products of his mind but borrowings from pagan authors.