But these dialectics, creditable to both parties, had little effect upon the general situation.
Aristotelian dialectics had always been taught in the schools; and reason as well as authority had been appealed to as the foundation of theology; but for the theologians of the 9th and 10th centuries, whose method had been merely that of restatement, ratio and auctoritas were in perfect accord.
The two systems were nothing more as yet than two different ways of interpreting a phrase of Porphyry, and they remained unnoticed in the for nearly two centuries not so much for its dialectics S' and philosophy as for its humanistic culture.
Arminius, fresh from Geneva, familiar with the dialectics of Beza, appeared to many the man able to speak the needed word, and so, in 1589, he was simultaneously invited by the ecclesiastical court of Amsterdam to refute Coornhert, and by Martin Lydius, professor at Franeker, to combat the two infralapsarian ministers of Delft.
He learned dialectics under Diogenes the Stoic, and under Hegesinus, the third leader of the Academy in descent from Arcesilaus.