Hellenism and Christianity

Three fathers of the Church produced Christian apologies in the first half of the fifth century. At the same time as St. Augustine was completing the last books of the Civitas Dei, Theodoret, the future bishop of Cyrrhus, was writing his Graecarum Affectionum Curatio. A short time later, St. Cyril of Alexandria began to circulate the Contra Julianum, the detailed refutation of the Contra Galilaeos of Julian, the Apostate. While the first two major defenses of the Christian faith of this period have been subjected to the exigencies of modern scholarship interest in St. Cyril's polemic against the Emperor Julian has been largely marginal. Scholars have been principally attracted to the Contra Julianum until the present because of fragments of the Contra Galilaeos and passages of the writings of other ancient authors that it has preserved. The Contra Julianum, moreover, has been consulted in so far as it offers pertinent material for those investigating some particular aspect of Cyrillian thought. But the Contra Julianum has yet to receive a complete examination in its own right in order to discover exactly what was St. Cyril's apologetic methodology and to assess his originality and indebtedness to others.