Sigalion in the Shield of Croesiades or Apologetic Dialogue for the Mystery of Detected Syncretism

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With what spirit, sense, and emotion, my Croesiades a name evoking the wealth and wisdom of Croesus, others are going to call or have called the militant Theology, praised by me, DRAMATIC, I can barely divine in the Lydian mode original: "λυδίω νόμω". Here, my epinoia ingenuity/conception flees me, anchinoia sharpness of mind deserts me, and the faculty of divination fails me. I am Davus, not Oedipus. One word hides a riddle too clever and abstruse. You, who are so sharp and successful a diver original: "Urinator" in perceiving the hidden senses of another’s mind, that you found—with the easiest suspicion—the feeling of criticism in the mystery of syncretism and the affect of grief that there is no more room made for militant Theology, I ask that you instruct me here, as I hesitate and remain suspended. Is it so that militant Theology, defamed by a new and hateful name, might be prohibited by everyone’s calculation? Or that the hatred of Syncretism might be compensated for by Dramaticism? Or does the drama of my Christeidos Christ-epic (in which I have set out to represent the face of the Church militant as if on a stage) burn the eyes of the wicked original: "τῶν πονηρῶν" and kindle malicious tongues? Inept, improvident, and—not to say—dishonest are those things! Improvident, for if I am so studious of militant Theology that I contend to measure out broader camps for it, what lack of thought is it to have provoked a Lydian into the field. Inept, for if militant Theology is converted into a Drama, it will entice spectators with a pleasant name, not repel them with an infamous and harsh one. Dishonest—see to it that you do not touch, through my side, him who contends as if in war with the world before the flood, who has always sounded the trumpet to conquer sins, and who asserted that he came to bring not peace, but a sword. Again, inept, improvident, and dishonest, if those others, marked by no color as yet, compensate for the filth of syncretism with another equally base name of Dramaticism. For what have light and play to do with mud, which Wisdom herself does not disdain, PLAYING before God in the circle of the earth, from which the origin of Drama, by a derivation neither unwilling nor brief—could be led, if that were the only thing to be done now. To Plato (at the start of Book 10 of the Republic), Homer seems the first teacher and leader of all tragedians. But he irrigated his little gardens from the Mosaic and Prophetic fountain: and just as he owes the elegances of his diction to the sacred code (which Jacob Cappell shows by parallelism in Vindiciae Casaubonianae), so too does he owe all the charm and beauty of Drama. Thus Theocritus, the idyll-writer and contemporary of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who—in the pastoral epithalamium which he dedicated most sweetly to the Messiah and the Church with the Solymitan woods jubilating, the breezes whispering, the leaves rustling, and the waters murmuring—converted those same things into Venus and Adonis, and Menelaus and Helen, having been caught in the act more than once. Solomon adorns the wedding dish; the same Arsinoë, daughter of Ptolemy, carries over in a festive procession. Solomon’s bride is sometimes feigned to be asleep, guarded from being awakened; sometimes she is awakened from the bed into the gardens. Theocritus’s scholiast observes both in the epithalamium, namely the song that both puts to sleep and awakens. Solomon’s Shulamite has singing girls as companions, yielding the primacy of beauty to their mistress; Helena brought the same, and in almost the same number. If those others are going to speak abuse against my Drama, let them know that I have long since grown calloused to such inept, improvident, and—I might almost say—dishonest insults, whether emitted by a defect of affect or of judgment; although I was warned of these very things, both in the pre-theory of that Drama and in some festive and solemn oration on the poetry of the Holy Spirit. Let those other Aristarchuses go now, laugh, and deny that Theology can be composed with the Dramatic: but if perhaps those same people promise friendly, delicate, and salty jokes, let them know that I do not seek Lydian caryces original: "Lydorum carycas" — a reference to a type of Lydian dancer or buffoon or whips, but that I can provoke them with their own play (I will say with the prince of Latin comedy) and make them into amoebean alternating/answering delights. Meanwhile, while they produce their own sales wit/salt, so Attic and so lepid, it helps here to interpose and, by a dramatic dialogue (which, although the ears of your other followers—most purged and more than Catonian—may loathe, yours—juvenile and more delicate, informed where good letters, exiled elsewhere, dwell—will easily admit by virtue of their age: or if these themselves are hindered by brows not yet mature;