I’ve recently been reading through Cyprian of Carthage’s On the
Church: Select Treatises in the Popular Patristics series from SVSP and was
struck by Cyprian’s exasperation in the treatise “To Demetrian” in dealing with
the pagan apologist:
You often come to me with an eagerness for making a case
against me rather than with intentions to learn anything. On such occasions you
prefer, sounding off shouted insults, to press your own case more repeatedly
and indecently rather than to listen to ours tolerantly.
It seems silly to engage with you when it would be easier and
less effort to quell the billowing waves of a stormy sea with cries of protest than
to restrain your rage by means of arguments. It is definitely a pointless task,
and not liable to success, to present light to a blind man, speech to a deaf
one, wisdom to one irrational, when the irrational man cannot think, nor the blind
allow in light, nor the deaf hear (pp. 68-69).
Who has not felt the same when dealing with those who only care
to build and knock down straw men? Let the reader understand.
JTR
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