The Translation Tampered With by Eusebius of Cremona

But what did they actually do? Consider what it was, and ask yourself whether the crime is not without precedent. Recall the passage that says: “But perhaps you will ask me what I think about the only Son himself. Well, if I should say that even to him the nature of God is invisible, since it is its very nature to be invisible, do not dismiss my answer as ungodly or absurd, for I will give you my reason at once.” Well, in place of the words I had written, “I will give you my reason at once,” they put these: “Do not dismiss my answer as ungodly or absurd, for as the Son does not see the Father, so the Holy Spirit also does not see the Son.” Suppose the man who did this, the man sent from their monastery to Rome as the greatest expert in slander, had been working in the courts and had committed this forgery in some worldly business. Everyone knows what would have happened to him under the public laws once he was convicted of the crime. But now that he has left the worldly life, turned his back on business, entered a monastery and attached himself to a famous master, he has learned from him to abandon his former self-restraint and become a raving madman. He was quiet before; now he stirs up sedition. He was peaceable; now he provokes war. Instead of harmony, he promotes strife. For faith he has learned treachery, and for truth, forgery. You might well think he would have been the perfect model of wickedness and crime of this kind, had you not had before you the image of that woman Jezebel. She is the one who made up the accusation against Naboth the Jezreelite for the sake of his vineyard, and sent word to the wicked elders to press a false charge against him, saying that he had blessed, that is, cursed, God and the king. I do not know which of the two is to be counted the more fortunate, she who gives the order or they who carry it out in all its wickedness. [a]

These are serious matters. Such a crime, as far as I know, has until now been almost unheard of in the church. Yet there is more to be said. What is that, you ask? It is this: that the guilty should become the judges, and that those who plotted the accusation should also pronounce the sentence. It is no new thing, of course, for a writer to make a mistake or a slip in his words, and in my opinion it is a pardonable fault, for Scripture also says, “In many things we all stumble; if anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man.” Is some word thought to be wrong? Then let it be corrected or amended, or, if it seems best, let it be taken out. But to insert into what another man has written things he never wrote; to put in false words for no other purpose than to defame your brother; to corrupt his writings in order to brand the author with disgrace; to whisper your ideas into the ears of the crowd so as to throw the minds of the simple into confusion; and all this in order to stain a man’s reputation among his fellows: whose work, I ask you, can this be, except the work of him who was a liar from the beginning, and who from accusing the brothers received the name Diabolus, which means accuser?

For when the man I have referred to read out at Milan one of these sentences that had been tampered with, and I cried out that what he was reading was falsified, he was asked from whom he had received the copy of the work. He said that a certain woman named Marcella had given it to him. About her I say nothing, whoever she may be. I leave her to her own conscience and to God. I am content with God’s own witness and with yours. When I say yours, I mean your own and that of Macarius himself, the saintly man for whom I was doing that work. Both of you read my papers themselves from the first, even before they were finished, and you have the fully corrected copies with you. You can bear witness to what I say. The words “as the Son does not see the Father, so also the Holy Spirit does not see the Son” were not only never written by me; on the contrary, I can point out the forger who wrote them. If anyone says that, as the Father does not see the Son, so the Son does not see the Father; or that the Holy Spirit does not see the Father and the Son in the way the Father sees the Son, and the Son and the Holy Spirit; let him be anathema. For he does see, and sees most truly; only, as God sees God and the Light sees the Light; not as flesh sees flesh, but as the Holy Spirit sees, not with the bodily senses but by the powers of the Godhead. I say, if anyone denies this, let him be anathema for all eternity. But as the apostle says, “He who troubles you will bear his judgment, whoever he is.”