Dialogue against the Luciferians

The Dialogus contra Luciferianos, also transmitted as the Altercatio Luciferiani et Orthodoxi, is a short Latin dialogue Jerome composed around 379, early in his career and while he was in Antioch. Its occasion was the aftermath of the Arian crisis. At the Council of Ariminum in 359 the Western bishops, pressed by the emperor Constantius, had subscribed to an ambiguous creed that abandoned the Nicene language of consubstantiality. When the Council of Alexandria in 362 offered a path of return for bishops who repented of that subscription, Lucifer, the exiled bishop of Cagliari, refused to accept it. His followers held that bishops who had lapsed into Arianism could never again hold office, and that any church in communion with such men was no longer the church. Jerome's dialogue stages the quarrel as a street argument between a Luciferian named Helladius and an unnamed Orthodox speaker, who agree to reconvene the next day before a notary so that the exchange can be recorded.

The argument turns on a single inconsistency that Jerome presses relentlessly. The Luciferians, unlike the more extreme deacon Hilary at Rome, accepted baptism administered by Arians and received Arian laity into communion through penance. If the baptism is valid, the Orthodox asks, then the Spirit was at work through the one who administered it; how can the same community receive the baptized layman and forever bar the bishop who baptized him? From there Jerome widens the case. He recounts the history of Ariminum and insists that the bishops erred in words rather than in faith, deceived by a formula they did not fully grasp; his sentence that the whole world groaned and marveled to find itself Arian comes from this passage. He appeals to the ark of Noah, which carried clean and unclean beasts together, and to the parable of the wheat and the tares, to argue that the church on earth is a mixed body whose purification belongs to God and not to a self-selecting remnant. He adds reflections that reach beyond the immediate controversy: that many practices observed in the churches rest on unwritten tradition that has acquired the force of law, that the reservation of chrismation to bishops serves the honor of the priesthood rather than strict necessity, and that the church consists not in walls but in the truth of its teaching. The Luciferian, worn down, agrees to return to communion.

The dialogue has endured as one of the clearest ancient statements of the principle that the church cannot be preserved by schism from the penitent, and it anticipates Augustine's reasoning against the Donatists. Historians read it as a primary witness to Ariminum and to the Luciferian movement; theologians return to it for its early articulation of the relation between tradition and Scripture and for its compact ecclesiology of the mixed body.

Who should read this: readers studying the fourth-century Arian controversy, the theology of schism and reconciliation, or the development of Jerome's thought before his great biblical work. It is not a devotional text and offers little to those seeking the spiritual counsel of Jerome's letters; readers who want a systematic ecclesiology will find a polemic, sharp and occasional, rather than a treatise.