Eunomius at Cyzicus

When the bishop of Constantinople learned of these things, he made Eunomius bishop of Cyzicus, since he was a man able by his eloquence to win the minds of the crowd over to his own way of thinking. When Eunomius arrived at Cyzicus, an imperial edict was published ordering that Eleusius be thrown out and Eunomius installed in his place. When this was carried out, the followers of Eleusius built a church outside the city and assembled there with him. [a]

But enough has been said about Eleusius; let us now give some account of Eunomius. He had been secretary to Aetius, nicknamed Atheus, of whom we spoke earlier, and from talking with him he had learned to imitate his sophistical way of reasoning. He little realized that, while he was training himself to frame false arguments and to use certain empty terms, he was really deceiving himself. This habit, however, puffed him up with pride, and he fell into blasphemous heresies, and so became an advocate of the doctrines of Arius and in various ways an opponent of the teachings of the truth. And since he had only a very slight knowledge of the letter of Scripture, he was wholly unable to enter into its spirit. Yet he had words in abundance, and he used to repeat the same thoughts in different terms without ever arriving at a clear explanation of what he had set out to say. His seven books On the Apostle’s Letter to the Romans, on which he spent a great deal of wasted labor, are a striking proof of this. Although he used an enormous number of words trying to explain it, he never managed to grasp the purpose and aim of that letter. All his other surviving works are of the same kind: anyone willing to take the trouble to examine them will find very little sense amid a great flood of words.

This was the Eunomius whom Eudoxius promoted to the see of Cyzicus. When he arrived there, he astonished his hearers with an extraordinary display of his “dialectic” art, and he caused a great stir in Cyzicus. In the end the people could no longer bear the empty and presumptuous parade of his language, and they drove him out of their city. So he withdrew to Constantinople, made his home with Eudoxius, and was regarded as a bishop without a church. But so that we will not seem to have said these things merely to run him down, let us hear what Eunomius himself has the nerve to say in his sophistical discourses about God himself. He uses these words: “God knows no more about his own substance than we do. It is not better known to him and less known to us. Whatever we know about the divine substance, that exactly is what God knows; and on the other hand, whatever he knows, you will find the very same in us, without any difference.” Eunomius used to draw up this and many other tedious and absurd fallacies like it, utterly blind to his own folly. Why he later separated from the Arians we will tell in its proper place.