Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| We see nothing remarkable in logical force in the treatise of Eunomius, and so embark on our Answer with a just confidence.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
§3.
We see nothing remarkable in logical force in the treatise of
Eunomius, and so embark on our Answer with a just
confidence.
Let no one think, that in saying
this I exaggerate and make an idle boast of doing something which is
beyond my strength. I shall not be led by any boyish ambition to
descend to his vulgar level in a contest of mere arguments and phrases.
Where victory is a useless and profitless thing, we yield it readily to
those who wish to win; besides, we have only to look at this
man’s long practice in controversy, to conclude that he is quite
a word-practitioner, and, in addition, at the fact that he has spent no
small portion of his life on the composition of this treatise, and at
the supreme joy of his intimates over these labours, to conclude that
he has taken particular trouble with this work. It was not improbable
that one who had laboured at it for so many Olympiads would produce
something better than the work of extempore scribblers. Even the vulgar
profusion of the figures he uses in concocting his work is a further
indication of this laborious care in writing63
| 63 Photius
reports very much the same as to his style, i.e. he shows a
‘prodigious ostentation:’ uses ‘words difficult to
pronounce, and abounding in many consonants, and that in a poetic, or
rather a dithyrambic style:’ he has ‘periods inordinately
long:’ he is ‘obscure,’ and seeks ‘to hide by
this very obscurity whatever is weak in his perceptions and
conceptions, which indeed is often.’ He ‘attacks others for
their logic, and is very fond of using logic himself:’ but
‘as he had taken up this science late in life, and had not gone
very deeply into it, he is often found making
mistakes.’
The book of Eunomius which
Photius had read is still extant: it is his ‘Apologeticus’
in 28 sections, and has been published by Canisius (Lectiones
Antiquæ, I. 172 ff.). His ἔκθεοις τῆς
τίστεως,
presented to the emperor Theodosius in the year 383, is also extant.
This last is found in the Codex Theodosius and in the mss. which Livineius of Ghent used for his Greek and Latin
edition of Gregory, 1574: it follows the Books against Eunomius. His
‘Apologia Apologiæ,’ which he wrote in answer to
Basil’s 5 (or 3) books against him, is not extant: nor
the δευτερὸς
λόγος which Gregory
answered in his second 12th Book.
Most of the quotations,
then, from Eunomius, in these books of Gregory cannot be verified, in
the case of a doubtful reading, &c. | . He has
got a great mass of newly assorted terms, for which he has put certain
other books under contribution, and he piles this immense congeries of
words on a very slender nucleus of thought; and so he has elaborated
this highly-wrought production, which his pupils in error are lost in
the admiration of;—no doubt, because their deadness on the vital
points deprives them of the power of feeling the distinction between
beauty and the reverse:—but which is ridiculous, and of no value
at all in the judgment of those, whose hearts’ insight is not
dimmed with any soil of unbelief. How in the world can it contribute to
the proof (as he hopes) of what he says and the establishment of the
truth of his speculations, to adopt these absurd devices in his forms
of speech, this new-fangled and peculiar arrangement, this fussy conceit, and
this conceited fussiness, which works with no enthusiasm for any
previous model? For it would be indeed difficult to discover who
amongst all those who have been celebrated for their eloquence he has
had his eye on, in bringing himself to this pitch; for he is like those
who produce effects upon the stage, adapting his argument to the tune
of his rhythmical phrases, as they their song to their castenets, by
means of parallel sentences of equal length, of similar sound and
similar ending. Such, amongst many other faults, are the nerveless
quaverings and the meretricious tricks of his Introduction; and one
might fancy him bringing them all out, not with an unimpassioned
action, but with stamping of the feet and sharp snapping of the fingers
declaiming to the time thus beaten, and then remarking that there was
no need of other arguments and a second performance after
that.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
