Against Eunomius 1.1

If all those upon whom the name of our God and Savior Jesus Christ has been invoked had been willing to attempt nothing against the truth of the gospel, and to be content with the tradition of the apostles and the simplicity of the faith, there would be no need of any words from us at present; even now we would surely have kept to the silence that we have honored from the beginning. But the enemy of the truth always increases evil by additions. Besides the tares that he sowed in the church of God from the beginning, he has now found instruments that take in his whole craft at once, and under the pretext of Christianity he brings in the denial of the divinity of the Only-Begotten, confounding the purity and simplicity of the teaching of the divine Spirit with this outside and vain wisdom, and misleading the more innocent with plausible talk. We too, therefore, of necessity, both for the love of you who have charged us with this and for our own safety, have disregarded our weakness in this matter. Although we are wholly untrained in this kind of discourse, we have undertaken, according to the measure of knowledge supplied to us by the Lord, to stand with the truth and to refute the falsehood. We consider that we shall surely not miss at least one of three goods: either the refutation will give those already taken in a remedy against the evil, or it will provide a moderate safeguard for the healthy, or at any rate we ourselves will obtain the reward for having chosen what is best for our brothers.

The first, as far as we know, who dared to say openly and to teach that the only-begotten Son is unlike God the Father in essence was Aetius the Syrian. I will not say in what sort of practices he was brought up from the beginning, nor how, as he went on, he slipped corruptingly into the churches of God, lest I seem to be reviling him and to have dropped the refutations. The one who took over the impiety and brought it to completion is this Eunomius the Galatian. He has won notoriety for himself out of the most shameful things ("for their glory," it says, "is in their shame"); preferring the ambition of writing what no one else had ever dared to the goods laid up for the pious, he was carried away into publishing in this splendid treatise the blasphemy that until then had been spoken under the breath, [eager to be proclaimed] the leader and … This, then, is the man we propose to call to account at present. Since there is one evil in both of them, it is clear that in the fully trained disciple the teacher too will be refuted together with him, the one who [sowed] the seeds … May it be given to us, through your prayers, to receive such power of argument that, like the zealot Phinehas, with the one stroke of refutation we may strike down both together, intertwined as they are with one another in impiety. Although, then, I could show him in this treatise to be a liar, ignorant, insolent, a dissembler, and a blasphemer, I will mention the rest only in passing; but I will try to strip the blasphemy that he uttered against the height of the glory of the Only-Begotten of the coverings his craft supplies, and to make it plain to all.

[2] Now I will proceed to the refutations, beginning from the very title. His first piece of mischief was to devise this form for his discourse, composing his teaching in the shape of an apology, so as not to seem to be setting out the doctrines of impiety of his own accord, but to have come to these arguments under compulsion. He wanted by every means to proclaim this wicked and godless message and to bring into the open the blasphemy he had long ago conceived and labored with. But he saw that to sit openly in the place of a teacher, besides being very vulgar and offensive to the hearers, would also make him unconvincing and suspect to the many, as one who had come to innovate from a desire for glory; whereas if he composed his arguments in the fiction of an apology, he would escape the suspicion of innovation and would rather win the hearers over by it, since all people by nature are accustomed to side in goodwill with the party at a disadvantage. That is why he blames accusers and slanderers and attaches to them the cause of his discourse. To make his craft plain to all, nothing is better than to hear the preface of his text. It runs thus:

EUNOMIUS: "We know that to slander and accuse people out of an unbridled tongue and an unfeeling mind is the work of the wicked and the quarrelsome; but for those who have been thought wicked through slander to try with all eagerness to turn back the falsehood by refutations is the work of prudent men, who together with their own good counsel set great store by the safety of the many."

BASIL: Such, then, is the form of his discourse, as it would be from one who does nothing simply or without guile. He shades the suspicion of innovation under the cover of an apology, and he hunts for goodwill from the hearers, as one who came to these arguments under the necessity of the slander. But his staging of an apology is refuted by this: since he cannot name an accuser for the charge against which he pretends to contend, he goes into a drama of apology without characters. It is not out of long-suffering that he refrains from naming those who grieved him (how could it be, when he drenches his opponents in so much abuse?); rather, suspecting that his lie would be obvious, he is ashamed to attach definite persons to himself as accusers. For if he had been able to name any, he would certainly have named them and shouted them abroad, if not to satisfy his own anger, at least to provide for the safety of the many, which he claims to care for most of all. For a hidden wickedness … the slanderers, we would more easily have escaped their unbridled tongues and unfeeling minds (for I will use the very words of this wisest of men). But since at that time, for whatever reason, he kept silent, let him now be questioned; let him now answer. Who are the accusers who, by getting in first with slanders, made the apology necessary for him? From what part of the world did they come? Who are the judges before whom he sets out his contest? In what court did he enter this suit? Where on land or sea was it convened? What, indeed, could they say? At Seleucia? But there they were convicted by their silence: although the assembled bishops summoned them many times to answer for the charges brought against them, they did not appear, and for this they were condemned on the spot. For common … because of their communion in impiety, like a diseased limb … there was no need there of apology and arguments. For having made their own the members of the imperial court and the most powerful of the rest, they dealt with affairs from a position of great superiority. They themselves were accusers and judges and executioners and whatever else they wished, when they expelled some bishops, installed others, and hung the danger of death over others, and divided the cities among themselves with great license. One of them, ousted from the cities of Syria, seized Constantinople as if for a tyranny; this invincible and clever speechwriter himself carried off Cyzicus as the prize of his impiety; and to Theosebius, after the refutations [of his defense] of the unspeakable blasphemies, the church of Sardis was [given] … the Cilicians, and all the regions upon which the evil spread as it moved around. What occasion for an apology was there then? Yet I think that not even someone who wished to could lie about this. So it is truer than anything that the form of his discourse is a device for deceit. So much for this.

A little further on, look at what he writes. For it is perhaps not useless, before the refutations of his impiety, to point out a few things about his conceit.

[3] EUNOMIUS: "Above all I ask you, both those who will hear now and those who will read later, not to want to distinguish falsehood from truth by numbers, joining the better to the larger share … … [nor to cloud] your judgment [with dignities], nor, by giving more weight to the order of those who came first, to stop your ears to those who come later."

BASIL: What are you saying? Are we not to give more weight to those who came first? Are we not to respect the multitude of the Christians now living and of all who have lived since the gospel was proclaimed? Are we not to take account of the dignity of those who have shone in spiritual gifts of every kind, against all of whom you have opened up this wicked road of impiety as a hostile and warring thing? Instead, are we to shut the eyes of our souls once and for all, banish from our minds the memory of every saint, and each of us lay his own heart, empty and swept clean, under your deceptions and sophisms? You would indeed have seized great power, if what the devil did not achieve by his manifold wiles you could achieve by command; if, persuaded by you, [we were to rank] the [tradition] that has prevailed through all past time under so many saints … your invention. It is not enough for him to steal away the thoughts of those now listening; he also expects those who will one day come upon his treatise to hold the same opinion. What arrogance! To think that his discourse will last into the future, and that his memory will be kept immortal for time to come! And this he now says presumptuously, though a little later, putting on airs before his hearers as if he cared nothing at all for conceit, he speaks thus to the judges in his drama:

EUNOMIUS: "Besides this, do not be harsh with us if, caring nothing for conceit and fear, and preferring immunity in the future to immediate favor and safety, [and judging] the threat appointed against the impious more fearful than every earthly hardship and temporal death, we set out the truth stripped of every covering."

BASIL: What excess of arrogance does this boast of words not surpass? And to the dissimulation is added insolence against the judges, if, because they find the good hard to bear, they can scarcely be restrained from being harsh toward one who cares nothing for presumption and conceit, who prefers immunity in the future to safety in the present, and who judges the punishment hereafter more fearful than temporal death. What does this amount to? "Do not be harsh with me, gentlemen, for having climbed to the very summit of virtue, having passed beyond earthly things and transferred my whole way of life to heaven." This is a new kind of arrogance. With the very words by which he pretends to care nothing for conceit he lifts himself up to the utmost pride. For if the things for which he shows that he deserves indulgence are the chief points of the gospel way of life, he leaves us to guess what sort of man he must think himself in his achievements. These things, then, which bear the stamp, as it were, of his whole purpose, have been said sufficiently, though much has been passed over in silence, so that by his lies we may recognize the father of lies speaking in him, and from his boasting … since the Apostle says that the one who is puffed up falls into the condemnation of the devil. Now at last let us come to the refutations of his impiety.