regarding those things which pertain to this exercise and to the life which is lived in fragile and infirm bodies, in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God has been sufficiently entreated by us. Let us depart, therefore.
DISPUTATION OF THE SAME ZACHARIAS AGAINST THOSE THINGS WHICH, CONCERNING TWO PRINCIPLES, WERE WRITTEN BY A CERTAIN MANICHAEAN AND CAST INTO PUBLIC VIEW, IN THE TIME OF THE EMPEROR JUSTINIAN.
If there are, in all things, contrary principles as you propose, B one which you call good, and another evil; it is necessary, if you say that the good is a substance, that the evil is not a substance. If you say the good is a principle, that the evil is not a principle: if you say the good is unbegotten and eternal, that the evil is not so. For if these have all things in common, how are they contrary? Furthermore, contraries are not said to be contrary insofar as they are substances; for there is nothing contrary to a substance, but they are contrary either insofar as they are relative, or according to quality and accident, or according to habit and privation: from which it follows that to the good alone, since it has none of these, there is nothing contrary; because it is good according to substance, and to substance there is no contrary. For "up" and "down" are called contraries, not insofar as they are substances, but insofar as they are relative. But things which are relative, since they are attached to corporeal nature, therefore "up" and "down" have no place in incorporeal nature, which excels all things and is understood to be incomprehensible.
And fear is called contrary to courage, not as some substance, but as a quality and accident, which often is present and is absent: for courage and fear in the soul are viewed not as substances, but as qualities. Wherefore they are not called souls, but are considered around the soul; courage as a habit of the soul, fear as a privation of habit. Just as health and disease in the body: whence it is necessary that habits are prior to privations. Therefore, it would be the height of folly to think this in God: for the distinction of good from evil has no place in God, but in the good and evil of human actions: the good indeed entering into the creature of God according to habit; but evil according to the privation of habit, arising often from the motion of the free will: for the good in the soul, and living according to virtue, as a certain best habit, as it has been said, comes to man: but the slothfulness of this, arising from will and from base habit and evil conversation, happens as evil, often, as a privation of habit.
C It is, therefore, crude and very unlearned to say that evil is contrary to the good according to substance and in itself, just as contraries are "up" and "down"; or for there to be altogether anything contrary to the good according to substance, which is God alone: for no one is good except one, God, because His good is alone immutable, as the primordially good, and good according to substance; for which reason there is nothing contrary to Him. Wherefore evil is not according to substance: for to that which is, is opposed by dividing, that which is not; whence that which is not is not a substance. If, however, that which is not is not a substance, and it is opposed to substance—dividing, as you say, the good, which is substance—from evil: therefore evil is not a substance.
But if these things are so, and the good which is in God is considered in one way, who is good, moved by Himself and good according to substance, and is understood as the primary good; but it is considered in another way in men, which often receives the voluntary privation of its proper habit, and the truth is with those things which are thus understood and said: is not the fable concerning two principles, which the common notions do not endorse, barbaric and foolish and in every part repugnant? For how can there be an *archē* (principle) which does not hold dominion in all things? If, however, it is necessary that the *archē* hold dominion in all things, there will be one sole prince, which we call the principle. Therefore, evil is not a substance, but a transgression of divine law, which happens to slothful reasoners from the sole motion of the free will, and is seen only in the action of those not obeying the law of God: whence it is in it [evil] to be able to cease, when those who do evil often repent, and return to virtue by the motion of the will; which indeed is a document that evils are not according to nature. For things which are according to nature cannot be overcome. But if evils are not by nature, and God is the maker of natures; therefore there will be one and only one principle: which, because it is uncircumscribed and is understood to be everywhere, gives no place to wickedness, which is not.
HISTORICAL FRAGMENTS OF ZACHARIAS
FROM THE PREFACE OF ANGELO MAI
(Script. Vet. vol. X, p. xli.)*On the fragments of the ecclesiastical history of Zacharias.*
The historian Zacharias, who is lost in his original Greek tongue (except for those passages which Evagrius cites), but is preserved in part in Syriac—into which he was once translated by some interpreter I know not—again demonstrates to us the utility of Oriental manuscripts. Assemanus provides information regarding him in *Bibliotheca Orientalis*, vol. II, p. 53, from which we learn that he lived under Justinian the Great around the year 540 and beyond; that he was a rhetorician by profession, and later bishop of Melitene in Lesser Armenia on the Euphrates A, which see the same Assemanus, in the same volume in his dissertation on the Monophysites, counts among the Jacobite sees. Therefore, William Cave is in error, who refers this historian to the year 491 and puts Zacharias Scholasticus in his place; or rather, he makes two men out of one. For my part, since I see among the published letters of Procopius of Gaza (Class. AA, vol. IV) some sent to a certain learned Zacharias, and since I also know that among the unpublished odes of John the grammarian of Gaza there is one in which Zacharias the philologist is praised (which two, I say, Procopius and John, were contemporaries of the historian Zacharias), I have almost persuaded myself that this is the same man, the historian and bishop, who had previously been a rhetorician in the celebrated city school of Gaza. B Zacharias’s ecclesiastical history, as Assemanus observes, ran from the reign of Constantine the Great to at least the twentieth year of Justinian, that is, 546 A.D.; and it was distributed into three parts; in the first of which Zacharias plundered Socrates, and in the second, Theodoret; while in the third, finally, he spoke by his own hand. Yet of this more precious part, nothing else remains in the Syriac Vatican codex 146 than those nineteen chapters which we publish in Syriac and Latin. Of these, Assemanus (vol. I, cap. 29) provides a brief twelfth chapter, where he writes about Simeon, bishop of Beth-Arsham from the year 510 to 525, from whom Zacharias took that famous History word for word. But Simeon was an orthodox bishop, as Assemanus demonstrates; wherefore these admirable Himyarites also sustained such and so great a struggle for the confession of the Catholic faith in the year of Christ 524, which in my judgment equals the glory of the Maccabees and the Roman matron Felicitas and her children. C But indeed, the full history of Zacharias was certainly in some Byzantine library, as I was reading in part in the Vatican codex of the Queen of Sweden, and in part in the Milanese codex, in which these books, which are lost to us, are recorded: 1. The Ecclesiastical History of the rhetorician Zacharias. 2. The Epitome and explanation of imperial laws by Cyril the monk. 3. The History of Constantine the Great by John, reader of the Roman Church. 4. An explanation of the Sunday Gospels of the whole year by Pope John of Rome. 5. The History of Greek theology by Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople. 6. An Epitome of all the synods by Sabinus the monk. 7. The interpretation of the Psalter and of all the volumes of the Bible by Symmachus the Hebrew. 8. The History of Dio, with only four leaves missing. (One codex says at the beginning, another in the middle.) 9. Twenty-four complete Comedies of Menander, explained by Michael Psellus. 10. The Comedies of Philemon. 11. Complete Euripides. 12. All of Aristophanes. 13. All of Sophocles. 14. Complete Euclid. 15. The Lexicon of Justinian the Great. 16. The Lexicon of Polydorus. I know that I am making philologists’ mouths water; for the rest, God will moderate these outcomes.
Certain omissions in the edition of Zacharias
I had omitted the passage concerning the destruction of Rome by the Goths under Justinian in the edition, because the beginning of the narrative was merely repeated from the very beginning, and therefore was of no use. D I had likewise left out the description of the city of Rome without translation, because certain words in the Syriac text are so corrupt that no meaning seems capable of being extricated from them. Now, however, I do not wish to defraud the students of Roman antiquities of this Oriental aid; yet I do so with the condition that regarding the desperate words I shall propose my own conjectures, waiting for better ones from those more skilled. I wish, however, that this description might be compared more leisurely with the writers on the urban regions, and especially with the Vatican codex edited by Muratori, *Inscript.* p. 2126 ff., and his *Breviarium*, p. 2134.