In Dialogue with Heresy
In Dialogue with Heresy
Christian Polemical Literature
This chapter argues that a sophisticated culture of Christian disputation continued in Vandal Africa. It explores an understudied cache of heresiological literature, written in all the genres that underpinned late-antique ecclesiastical controversies (letters, sermons, tractates, florilegia, question-and-answer texts, and dialogues). Their authors used familiar tropes to present their opponents as heretics and themselves as orthodox. Particularly significant are a (rather surreal) series of imaginary debate texts that presented Nicene church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine triumphing over historical Arian heretics like Arius and Pascentius. These virtual dialogues both mirrored and modeled various forms of real debate between Nicene and Homoian authority figures. The striking resemblance between these texts and those written by earlier Christian controversialists was not merely a continuity of literary form. These works suggest that the practical implications of controversy for Christian clerics remained the same.
Keywords: heresiology, debate, florilegia, Vigilius of Thapsa, Athanasius of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, conciliar acts
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