Cyprian’s Corpus

The Works of Cyprian of Carthage

Cyprian, bishop of Carthage

Eighty-one letters from a man who had nine years to be a bishop and used all of them.

Catch rate: Not found in the wild
Base research: 180
Stat total: 308

Base stats

Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.

Stamina74

Contend84

Defend80

Popularity70

Total308

Why these numbers

The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.

Stamina 74

Thirteen treatises and eighty-one letters — the fullest picture anyone has of how a third-century church actually ran, week to week, under pressure.

Contend 84

High. Cyprian answered the two hardest questions of his century: what to do with Christians who denied Christ under persecution, and whether the church can be more than one body. The church has quoted his answers ever since.

Defend 80

Cyprian was copied more than any Latin Christian writer before Augustine, and the letters survive in numbers a third-century text has no business surviving in. Very hard to knock off a text this well attested.

Popularity 70

Named in every argument about church order there has been, and by both sides of most of them. It takes the floor early.

Cited for this book

Cyprian’s letters are what make this collection special. They are not essays. They are a working bishop writing to other bishops, to his clergy while he was in hiding, and to churches he could not visit. They deal with money, with who may return after denying Christ, and with a man claiming an office he did not hold.

Development

A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.

The Primacy Text→
Lv 24

On the Unity→
Lv 32

Cyprian’s Corpus

Moves learned

By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.

Lv	Move	Type	Cat.	Pwr	Acc	PP
32	The Universal Church	Ecclesiology	Type shift	—	—	10
32	The Lapsed	Ethics	Argument	80	100%	10
36	Affirm	—	Status	—	—	1
38	In Time of Plague	Ethics	Argument	70	100%	10
50	Speak Latin	History	Status	—	100%	5

The quotes behind its moves

How to read these. In Scholar’s Dream, books argue with each other. Each thing a book can do in a debate is a move, and most moves carry a real quotation — the words the book puts on the table when it uses that move.

Strong against lists the opposing books and arguments a move was written to answer. Used against one of them, it hits much harder than usual: ×2 means twice the normal force, ×4 four times. It is the game’s way of saying: this is the sentence that answers that argument. Open an entry to read why.

“Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; even as where Jesus may be, there is the universal Church.”
Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8.2 (trans. Lightfoot, public domain).public domain

The Universal Church

EcclesiologyType shift

In the gameThe church is wherever Christ is — larger than the congregation currently arguing. Raises the user’s Defend. The earliest surviving use of the phrase “the catholic church.”

Strong against

×3The Church That Suffersan argument · why?

It answers with the one mark he cannot claim — but nobody wins this one cleanly.

×2The Conscience of the Giveran argument · why?

Ignatius wrote that where Jesus Christ is, there is the universal church. What cleanses is Christ’s presence, not the conscience of the man pouring the water.

“For in him we live, and move, and have our being. As some of your own poets have said.”
Acts 17:28 (WEB) — Paul at the Areopagus, quoting the Athenians’ own poets back to them.

Affirm

Status

In the gamePick the part of the opponent’s case that is true and affirm it. That point can no longer be used against you, and the opponent’s Defend falls sharply. It deals no damage. Affirm something false and you have only agreed with an error.