<i>Simpliciores</i>,<i>Eruditi</i>, and the Noetic Form of God: Pre-Nicene Christology Revisited
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen have shown that anthropomorphism, one of the most popular and equally biblical tenets of ancient Christianity, was spread out not only among thesimpliciores(the simple) of the early ecclesia but also among itseruditi(its educated members), particularly suchdocti(learned) in Stoicism like Tertullian. Following previous researchers, Griffin and Paulsen have also argued that Christian Platonizing authors, starting with Origen in the East and Marius Victorinus in the West, developed a sturdy campaign of promoting the doctrine of an incorporeal God. At a time when the clergy itself was largely conceiving God as a corporeal entity, the Christian Platonists were heavily employing the rhetoric of erudition in order to uphold an anti-anthropomorphist agenda. Other scholars have noticed that Origen of Alexandria was the first (or among the first) to relate the anthropomorphist position to the uneducated members of the Christian community, thesimpliciores. Later on, Cassian, Socrates, Sozomen, and Palladius will communicate the events of the Origenist debate by means of the same distinction betweensimplicioresanderuditi. As Elizabeth A. Clark observes: According to several fifth-century Christian writers—Socrates, Sozomen, and Palladius, all of whom sided with the alleged Origenists—the simple desert Monks were outraged by Theophilus of Alexandria's Festal Letter of 399 that championed God's incorporeality, a position in accord with that of Alexandria's most important theologian, Origen. Griffin and Paulsen equally find several Augustinian pages in which the bishop of Hippo asserts that the “Church'seducated men(docti)” cannot embrace anthropomorphism, and he prefers to portray the less educated Christians as “whimpering babies,” “children,” or possessing a “childishness of mind.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".