Folia Theologica 17. (2006)
László Perendy: A Christian Platonist
A CHRISTIAN PLATONIST 173 that they also were an important part of his life-work. The scholars who accuse him of one-sidedness in connection with some theological questions argue only from his extant works and often forget that his lost works formed also a very substantial part of his teaching activities. So let us see what we know about his lost works. In the Sacra Parallela by Saint John of Damascus we can find fragments from his work, titled Tlepi dvaoThoew. He also wrote another work against all the heresies, which he mentions in his Apologia Maior. Its title is ZúvTayga Kara Traaajv twv yeyevriiiévwv aîpéaewv auvT€Tay(iévov. As far as we know, nothing has remained from this work. Tertullian may have known it, because he mentions Justin as the first adversary of Valentinus. Irenaeus mentions that he wrote a work Contra Marcionem, but some scholars think that this work was only a chapter of the ZwTayga. Irenaeus used it as a source for his Adversus Haereses with all probability. Eusebius mentions a probably shorter and less important work, whose title is Aóyos Trpôç "EXXqva. But let us quote of Eusebius' catalogue: "There is a treatise by him, on behalf of our opinions, addressed to Antoninus, surnamed Pius, and his children, and to the Roman Senate another, containing a second Apology for our defence, which he made to the successor and namesake of the above mentioned emperor, Antoninus Verus, whose period we are at present discussing; and another to the Greeks, in which, after a long and expanded argument about very many things inquired into both by Christians and the philosophers of the Greeks, he discourses on the nature of demons, which there is no urgency to quote at present. Again a second treatise against the Greeks has reached us, which he entitled A Confutation, and besides them another about the Sovereignty of God which he compiled not only from our own scriptures but also from the books of the Greeks. Besides these he wrote the book entitled Psaltes and another disputation On the Soul, in which he propounds various questions concerning the problem under discussion and adduces the opinion of the Greek philosophers; these he promises to refute and to give his own opinion in another book."10 10K. LAKE (tr.), Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, Vol. I., Cam- bridge/Mass, 1959, 369-371.
