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| All his insulting epithets are shewn by facts to be false.
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§10.
All his insulting epithets are shewn by facts to be
false.
I therefore pass over everything
else, as mere insolent mockery and scoffing abuse, and hasten to the
question of his doctrine. Should any one say that I decline to be
abusive only because I cannot pay him back in his own coin, let such an
one consider in his own case what proneness there is to evil generally,
what a mechanical sliding into sin, dispensing with the need of any
practice. The power of becoming bad resides in the will; one act of
wishing is often the sufficient occasion for a finished wickedness; and
this ease of operation is more especially fatal in the sins of the
tongue. Other classes of sins require time and occasion and
co-operation to be committed; but the propensity to speak can sin when
it likes. The treatise of Eunomius now in our hands is sufficient to
prove this; one who attentively considers it will perceive the rapidity
of the descent into sins in the matter of phrases: and
it is the easiest thing in the world to imitate these, even though one
is quite unpractised in habitual defamation. What need would there be
to labour in coining our intended insults into names, when one might
employ upon this slanderer his own phrases? He has strung together, in
fact, in this part of his work, every sort of falsehood and
evil-speaking, all moulded from the models which he finds in himself;
every extravagance is to be found in writing these. He writes
“cunning,” “wrangling,” “foe to
truth,” “high-flown89
,”
“charlatan,” “combating general opinion and
tradition,” “braving facts which give him the lie,”
“careless of the terrors of the law, of the censure of
men,” “unable to distinguish the enthusiasm for truth from
mere skill in reasoning;” he adds, “wanting in
reverence,” “quick to call names,” and then
“blatant,” “full of conflicting suspicions,”
“combining irreconcileable arguments,” “combating his
own utterances,” “affirming contradictories;” then,
though eager to speak all ill of him, not being able to find other
novelties of invective in which to indulge his bitterness, often in
default of all else he reiterates the same phrases, and comes round
again a third and a fourth time and even more to what he has once said;
and in this circus of words he drives up and then turns down, over and
over again, the same racecourse of insolent abuse; so that at last even
anger at this shameless display dies away from very weariness. These
low unlovely street boys’ jeers do indeed provoke disgust rather
than anger; they are not a whit better than the inarticulate grunting
of some old woman who is quite drunk.
Must we then enter minutely into
this, and laboriously refute all his invectives by showing that Basil
was not this monster of his imagination? If we did this, contentedly
proving the absence of anything vile and criminal in him, we should
seem to join in insulting one who was a ‘bright particular
star’ to his generation. But I remember how with that divine
voice of his he quoted the prophet90
with regard to
him, comparing him to a shameless woman who casts her own reproaches on
the chaste. For whom do these reasonings of his proclaim to be
truth’s enemy and in arms against public opinion? Who is it who
begs the readers of his book not ‘to look to the numbers of those
who profess a belief, or to mere tradition, or to let their judgment be
biassed so as to consider as trustworthy what is only suspected to be
the stronger side?’ Can one and the same man write like this, and
then make those charges, scheming that his readers should follow his
own novelties at the very moment that he is abusing others for opposing
themselves to the general belief? As for ‘brazening out facts
which give him the lie, and men’s censure,’ I leave the
reader to judge to whom this applies; whether to one who by a most
careful self-restraint made sobriety and quietness and perfect purity
the rule of his own life as well as that of his entourage, or to one
who advised that nature should not be molested when it is her pleasure
to advance through the appetites of the body, not to thwart indulgence,
nor to be so particular as that in the training of our life; but that a
self-chosen faith should be considered sufficient for a man to attain
perfection. If he denies that this is his teaching, I and any
right-minded person would rejoice if he were telling the truth in such
a denial. But his genuine followers will not allow him to produce such
a denial, or their leading principles would be gone, and the platform
of those who for this reason embrace his tenets would fall to pieces.
As for shameless indifference to human censure, you may look at his
youth or his after life, and you would find him in both open to this
reproach. The two men’s lives, whether in youth or manhood, tell
a widely-different tale.
Let our speech-writer, while he
reminds himself of his youthful doings in his native land, and
afterwards at Constantinople, hear from those who can tell him what
they know of the man whom he slanders. But if any would inquire into
their subsequent occupations, let such a person tell us which of the
two he considers to deserve so high a reputation; the man who
ungrudgingly spent upon the poor his patrimony even before he was a
priest, and most of all in the time of the famine, during which he was
a ruler of the Church, though still a priest in the rank of
presbyters91
| 91 ἔτι
ἐν τῷ κληρῳ
τῶν
πρεσβυτερων
ιερατεύων | ; and afterwards did not hoard even what
remained to him, so that he too might have made the Apostles’
boast, ‘Neither did we eat any man’s bread for nought92
;’ or, on the other hand, the man who has
made the championship of a tenet a source of income, the man who creeps
into houses, and does not conceal his loathsome affliction by staying
at home, nor considers the natural aversion which those in good health
must feel for such, though according to the law of old he is one of
those who are banished from the inhabited camp because of the contagion
of his unmistakeable93
| 93 According
to Ruffinus (Hist. Eccl. x. 25), his constitution was poisoned
with jaundice within and without. | disease.
Basil is called ‘hasty’ and ‘insolent,’
and in both characters ‘a liar’ by this man who
‘would in patience and meekness educate those of a contrary
opinion to himself;’ for such are the airs he gives himself when
he speaks of him, while he omits no hyperbole of bitter language, when
he has a sufficient opening to produce it. On what grounds, then, does
he charge him with this hastiness and insolence? Because ‘he
called me a Galatian, though I am a Cappadocian;’ then it was
because he called a man who lived on the boundary in an obscure corner
like Corniaspine94
| 94 ἐν
ἀνωνύμῳ τινι
Κορνιασπινῆς
ἐσχατί& 139·. Cf. μεγὰ χρῆμα
ὑ& 232·ς (Herod.) for the
use of this genitive. In the next sentence εἰ ἀντὶ, though it gives the sense translated in the text, is not so good
as ᾗ ἀντὶ (i.e. ἐσχατία), which Oehler suggests, but does not adopt.
With regard to
Eunomius’ birthplace, Sozomen and Philostorgius give Dacora
(which the former describes as on the slopes of Mt. Argæus: but
that it must have been on the borders of Galatia and Cappadocia is
certain from what Gregory says here): ‘Probably Dacora was his
paternal estate: Oltiseris the village to which it belonged’
(Dict. Christ. Biog.; unless indeed Corniaspa, marked on the maps as a
town where Cappadocia, Galatia and Pontus join, was the spot, and
Oltiseris the district. Eunomius died at Dacora. | a Galatian instead of an Oltiserian;
supposing, that is, that it is proved that he said this. I have not
found it in my copies; but grant it. For this he is to be called
‘hasty,’ ‘insolent,’ all that is bad. But the
wise know well that the minute charges of a faultfinder furnish a
strong argument for the righteousness of the accused; else, when eager
to accuse, he would not have spared great faults and employed his
malice on little ones. On these last he is certainly great, heightening
the enormity of the offence, and making solemn reflections on
falsehood, and seeing equal heinousness in it whether in great or very
trivial matters. Like the fathers of his heresy, the scribes and
Pharisees, he knows how to strain a gnat carefully and to swallow at
one gulp the hump-backed camel laden with a weight of wickedness. But
it would not be out of place to say to him, ‘refrain from making
such a rule in our system; cease to bid us think it of no account to
measure the guilt of a falsehood by the slightness or the importance of
the circumstances.’ Paul telling a falsehood and purifying
himself after the manner of the Jews to meet the needs of those whom he
usefully deceived did not sin the same as Judas for the requirement of
his treachery putting on a kind and affable look. By a falsehood Joseph
in love to his brethren deceived them; and that too while swearing
‘by the life of Pharaoh95
;’ but his
brethren had really lied to him, in their envy plotting his death and
then his enslavement. There are many such cases: Sarah lied, because
she was ashamed of laughing: the serpent lied, tempting man to disobey
and change to a divine existence. Falsehoods differ widely according to
their motives. Accordingly we accept that general statement about man
which the Holy Spirit uttered by the Prophet96
,
‘Every man is a liar;’ and this man of God, too, has not
kept clear of falsehood, having chanced to give a place the name of a
neighbouring district, through oversight or ignorance of its real name.
But Eunomius also has told a falsehood, and what is it? Nothing less
than a misstatement of Truth itself. He asserts that One who always is
once was not; he demonstrates that One who is truly a Son is falsely so
called; he defines the Creator to be a creature and a work; the Lord of
the world he calls a servant, and ranges the Being who essentially
rules with subject beings. Is the difference between falsehoods so very
trifling, that one can think it matters nothing whether the falsehood
is palpable97
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