Letter 135

135. To Diodorus, Presbyter of Antioch

I have read the books sent by your Honour. With the second I was greatly delighted, not only for its brevity — as was natural for one now sluggish in all things and feeble in condition — but because it is at once dense in its ideas, and in it the objections of the opponents and the answers to them are set out with clarity; and the plainness and unadorned quality of the diction seemed to me fitting for the purpose of a Christian who writes not so much for display as for the common good. But the former book, though it has the same force in its substance, yet being dressed up with more elaborate language and varied figures and the graces of dialogue, seemed to me to require much time to go through, and much labour of mind both to gather its ideas and to retain them in memory. For the calumnies of the opponents and the rejoinders of our own side, thrown in between, though they seem to lend the treatise certain dialectical charms, nevertheless, by introducing leisure and delay, break up the continuity of the thought and slacken the tension of the argumentative discourse.

For your shrewdness has surely perceived this, that even among the philosophers outside the faith, those who composed dialogues — Aristotle and Theophrastus — laid hold at once of the matters themselves, because they were conscious of their own lack of Platonic graces. But Plato, with his command of language, at the same time contends with his doctrines and also ridicules the persons of his speakers: in Thrasymachus assailing his boldness and rashness, in Hippias the lightness and emptiness of his mind, and in Protagoras his arrogance and pomposity. But where he brings indeterminate persons into his dialogues, he uses the interlocutors for the sake of clarity in the matters, but introduces nothing further from the persons into his subjects; as he did in the Laws.

It behoves us too, then, who come to writing not out of vanity, but having chosen to leave behind for the brotherhood the foundations of profitable discourse — if we set up some person already proclaimed to all for the wilfulness of his character, to weave into the discourse something also from the quality of that person, if indeed it falls to us at all to assail men, leaving the matters aside. But if the interlocutor is indeterminate, the digressions against the persons break the continuity, and arrive at no useful end.

These things I have said in order to show that you have not sent your labours into the hands of a flatterer, but have shared your toils with a most genuine brother. And I have said them not to correct what is written, but as a safeguard for what is to come. For surely one who has employed such skill and zeal in writing will not shrink from writing on; since those who furnish the subjects do not leave off either. For us it will be enough to read your works; but from being able to write anything ourselves we are so far removed that I am almost ready to say we are removed even from being in health, or from having moderate leisure from affairs.

I have now sent, by the reader, the larger and earlier book, having gone through it as far as I was able. The second I have kept back, wishing to copy it out, but for the present finding no one who writes quickly. For to such poverty have the much-envied possessions of the Cappadocians come.