FIRST DIALOGUE

ISAGOGICAL.

CROESIADES.

§. 2.

"Man, do not kill Croesus": Spare your father, he is innocent! He has done nothing wicked, nothing indecorous! SIGALION. You fear in vain, my Croesiades. This is another arena in which we are contending: namely, the one in which to win and to be won over for the truth is beautiful; in which Plato is a friend, Socrates is a friend, but truth is a greater friend; in which, friendship being safe, it is allowed to go into other things; in which the princes of the Apostles, Peter the elder and Paul the junior, were involved—one was able to blush, the other to induce a blush, with the bond of charity untouched; in which the ulcer is sought, not the man, or even if Jason of Pherae (as cited in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, book 3; Valerius Maximus, book 1, chapter 8) is sought by the strike of a sword, the abscess is opened, and Jason remains safe. CROESIADES. But the strike is to be laughed at because it is inept; to be despised because it is imprudent; to be chastised because it is dishonest. To no sane person can it be obscure how ineptly or improvidently—I will not say dishonestly—some impose the infamous label of Syncretism on the desire and study of Ecclesiastical concord. Indeed, that word will hardly occur among the Ancients elsewhere than in that book of Plutarch. "The Cretans, often engaged in seditions and wars with one another, were accustomed to resolve them and unite when foreign enemies approached. And this was what was called by them syncretismus syncretism." Cretans, agitated by frequent seditions and civil wars, upon the arrival of external enemies, made transactions and joined together. For that was what they called syncretism. With the enemies driven away, fear and danger ceasing, they returned without doubt to their nature: "Cretans are liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons." Syncretism, therefore, does not concern dogmas or opinions of the mind and religion, but is the intermission and suspension of civil dissensions and the joining of forces and arms to repress external enemies imminent to the dissidents, to last as long as fear and danger shall have lasted, and to go off into smoke and winds when they shall have ceased. Again, let our desire, our study of uniting the minds of Christians, cease to be whipped with the infamous labels of Atheism and Samaritanism. SIGALION. These are indeed the chapters of your accusation to be treated one by one. About the first, first of all. In which, before all else, I think you must be careful not to envy the grammarian (a) Marcellus, who—what Tiberius could not do—has the (b) power of creating names original: "ὀνοματοποιΐας ἐξουσίαν"; lest you prohibit the frequent use of a word which not he—who is the first with whom you have business—forged, but gave to you in your Palatine Irenic Fistula original: "fistula Irenica palatina", with your own pipe—I wish it were not worse! Lest you drive from the Schools that art of defining which, having followed the precept (d) of the Philosopher, forms one single Idea of a thing out of many particular examples: lest you proscribe a comparative agnomination born from the analogy of similars under the name of ineptitude; so that it may be possible for you, through Tertullianus, to call the mysteries of the Christian Church Sacraments, because they are similar to military Sacraments; so that it may be possible for a grammarian to call a solecism a phrase which, although it had never seen the Cilicians alone, yet contaminates the speech with an equal fault. Although if you prefer to say contagion of contrary religions, no one seems to be going to prohibit that. If it shall appear from your own concession, and from that dialogue which you are about to hear shortly, that mystical syncretism conceived in Germany is so similar to that old Grecian one (let it be monadic, and hardly occurring elsewhere than in Plutarch, although if it occurred elsewhere, is that rashly?) that nothing is more similar to it than that—with what face will you deny the same name to such German brothers in blood? (e) Who