Eusebius Did Not Falsify Your Papers

Let us understand what wrong was done by my friend, who, you say, “falsified parts of your papers when they had not yet been corrected or finished, and it was all the easier to falsify them because very few, if any, had them yet.” I have said already, and I now say again, solemnly in the presence of God, that I did not approve of his accusing you, nor of any Christian accusing another Christian. What need is there for matters that can be corrected or set right in private to be published abroad, to make many stumble and fall? But since every man lives for his own appetite, and a man does not become master of your will by becoming your friend, I blame the accusing of a brother even when the charge is true; and in the same way I cannot accept this charge of falsifying your papers against a man of holy character. How could a man who knows only Latin change anything in a translation from the Greek? Or how could he take out or put in anything in a book like On First Principles, where everything is so closely knit together that one part hangs on another, and anything taken out or put in to suit your purpose must at once stand out like a patch on a garment? What you ask me to do, do yourself. Put on at least a small measure of natural modesty, if not Christian modesty, in what you assert. Do not despise and trample on your conscience, and imagine that you are in the right because of a show of words when the facts are against you. [a]

If Eusebius bought your uncorrected papers for money in order to falsify them, produce the genuine papers that have not been falsified; and if you can show that there is nothing heretical in them, then he will be open to the charge of forgery. But however much you alter or correct them, you will not make them out to be catholic. If the error lay only in the words, or in a few statements, the bad might be cut out and the good put in its place. But the whole discussion proceeds on a single principle: the idea that the entire universe of reasoning creatures has fallen by its own will, and will hereafter return to a state of unity, and that from that starting point another fall will begin again. What can you amend, unless you alter the whole book? And if you thought of doing that, you would no longer be translating another man’s work but writing a work of your own.

However, I can hardly see where your argument is heading. I suppose you mean that because the papers were uncorrected and had not had their final revision, Eusebius could falsify them more easily. Perhaps I am stupid, but the argument seems to me rather foolish and pointless. If the papers were uncorrected and had not had their final revision, the errors in them must be laid not on Eusebius but on your own laziness and delay in putting off their correction. All the blame that can be laid on him is that he passed around among the body of Christians writings that you had meant to correct in due course. But if, as you assert, Eusebius falsified them, why do you bring up the claim that they were uncorrected, and that they had gone out to the public without their final revision? Papers can be falsified just as easily whether they have been corrected or not. “But no one,” you say, “had these books, or very few.” What contradictions this one sentence contains! If no one had these books, how could they be in the hands of a few? If a few had them, why do you falsely say there were none? And then, when you say that a few had them, and by your own admission the claim that no one had them falls to the ground, what becomes of your complaint that your secretary was bribed with money? Tell us the secretary’s name, the amount of the bribe, the place, the go-between, the one who received it. Of course the traitor has been thrown out of your service, and a man convicted of so great a crime has been cut off from all familiar dealings with you!

Is it not more likely that the copies of the work that Eusebius obtained were given him by those few friends you speak of, especially since these copies agree with one another so completely that they do not differ by a single stroke of the pen? We might also ask whether it was quite wise to give others a copy you had not yet corrected. The documents had not yet had their last corrections, and yet other men had these errors of yours that needed correcting. Do you not see that your falsehood does not hold together? Besides, what good was it to you at that particular moment, and how would it have helped you escape the condemnation of the bishops, that the book under discussion should be open to everyone, and that you should thus be refuted by your own words? From all this it is clear, in the famous orator’s phrase, that you have the will to lie but not the skill to frame a lie.