Boasting of Eloquence and of Ignorance

I will follow the order of your letter and add your very words as you wrote them. “I admit that, as you say, I praised your eloquence in my preface; and I would praise it again now, were it not that, against the advice of your Cicero, you make it hateful by excessive boasting.” Where have I boasted of my eloquence? I did not even accept willingly the praise you gave it. Perhaps you say this because you do not want to be flattered yourself by public praise given with a hidden purpose. Rest assured, you will be accused openly. You reject one who would praise you; you will find out what it is to have one who openly charges you. I was not so foolish as to criticize your uneducated style; no one can expose it to condemnation as thoroughly as you do yourself whenever you write. I only wanted to show your fellow disciples, who share your lack of literary training, what progress you had made in your thirty years in the East: an uneducated writer who takes impudence for eloquence, and thinks that speaking evil of everyone is the sign of a good conscience. I am not going to take up the schoolmaster’s cane. I do not presume, as you put it, to apply the strokes of the leather strap to teach an elderly pupil his letters. But the truth is that your eloquence and learning sparkle so brightly that we mere writers of pamphlets cannot bear it. You dazzle our eyes with the sharpness of your talents to such a degree that we must all seem envious of you; and we really must join together to keep you down. For if you once gain first place among us as a writer, and stand at the very top of the arch of rhetoric, none of us who claim to know anything will be allowed to mutter a word. [a]

According to you, I am a philosopher and an orator, a grammarian, a logician, a man who knows Hebrew, Greek and Latin, a “trilingual” man. On that reckoning you too will be “bilingual,” since you know enough Latin and Greek to make the Greeks think you a Latin scholar and the Latins think you a Greek one. And the bishop Epiphanius will be a “five-tongued” man, since he speaks in five languages against you and your darling. But I wonder at the rashness that made you dare to say to one so accomplished as you claim to think me: “You, whose accomplishments give you so many watchful eyes, how can you be pardoned if you go wrong? How can you escape being buried in the silence of an everlasting shame?” When I read this, I reflected that I must have slipped somewhere in my words, for “if anyone does not go wrong in word, he is a perfect man.” I was expecting him to expose some of my faults. Then all of a sudden I came on the words: “Two days before the bearer of this letter set out, your speech against me was put into my hands.” What became, then, of those threats of yours, and of your words, “How can you be pardoned if you go wrong? How can you escape being covered with the silence of an everlasting shame?” Yet perhaps, short as the time was, you managed to put this in order; or else you intended to hire one of the learned sort, who would expect to find in my works the ornaments and jewels of an eloquence like yours.

Earlier you wrote, “Accept the document I send, which you wanted to buy at a great price”; but now you speak with a pretense of humility: “I meant to follow your example; but since the messenger who was returning to you was hurrying back again, I thought it better to write briefly to you than at greater length to others.” Meanwhile you take bold pleasure in your lack of learning. Indeed you once admitted it, declaring that “it was pointless to notice a few faults of style, when it was acknowledged that there were faults in every part.” So I will not find fault with you for writing that a document was “acquired” when you meant that it was “bought,” though acquiring is said of things alike in kind, while buying means counting out money. Nor will I fault a sentence like “as he who was returning to you was hurrying back again,” a repetition worthy of the poorest style of writing. I will reply only to the arguments, and I will convict you, not of solecisms and barbarisms, but of falsehood, cunning and impudence.