Polemic expires

Claim (verbatim)

Polemic expires: within a single church father's corpus, refutations of heresies that were extinct by about 800 should transmit far worse than the same author's non-polemical dogmatic and homiletic works. Copying was demand-driven, and a dead opponent generates no classroom, liturgical, or catena demand; the author's canonical prestige does not rescue the genre. The provocation: the anti-heretical classics are precisely the works modern patrology treats as central, yet the Byzantine copying market should have treated them as expired ammunition — modern criticism and medieval demand ranked the same corpus in opposite orders.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Epiphanius in Pinakes, partition each corpus into adversus-works against opponents extinct by 800 versus the author's other prose works. Primary clause: the pooled median witness count of the expired-polemic partition is at most half the pooled median of the non-polemic partition; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: the deficit shrinks or vanishes (ratio at least 0.8) for polemic against opponents still live in Byzantium after 800, showing the driver is opponent vitality, not genre.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the in-house Pinakes works-by-witnesses counts, with works classifiable by Clavis Patrum Graecorum genre and polemical target.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The governing mechanism -- copying is demand-driven, so a text whose occasion has died is not rescued by its author's prestige -- is the established survival-demography principle (Cisne), and it is a recognized fact that much anti-heretical/heresiological literature transmits poorly, surviving in single witnesses or only as citations once its target heresy was extinct. Not located: the item's within-author, opponent-vitality-controlled partition -- an author's adversus-works against opponents extinct by 800 transmitting at <=half the median of his non-polemical prose, the deficit vanishing for still-live opponents -- on the in-house Pinakes counts classified by Clavis Patrum Graecorum genre and target.

• John L. Cisne, 'How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts' Demography and Classic Texts' Extinction', Science 307 (2005) — Demand-driven survival demography of medieval copies
• In-house Pinakes works-by-witnesses counts, classifiable by CPG genre and polemical target — The kill dataset for the polemic-vs-non-polemic partition

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.