Eunomius of Cyzicus

“ It appears that, during the reign of Valens, Eunomius had some dispute with his own clergy at Cyzicus, and had in consequence seceded from the Arians, and retired to Bithynia, near Constantinople. Here multitudes resorted to him; some also gathered from different quarters, a few with the design of testing his principles, and others merely from the desire of listening to his discourses. His reputation reached the ears of the emperor, who would gladly have held a conference with him. ”

“ And from that time he set up a sect of his own for all the men who were of his way of thinking and condemned his betrayal, separated from Eudoxius and joined with Eunomius, whose name they bear up to this day. So Eunomius became the founder of a heresy, and added to the blasphemy of Arius by his own peculiar guilt. He set up a sect of his own because he was a slave to his ambition, as the facts distinctly prove. For when Aetius was condemned and exiled, Eunomius refused to accompany him, though he called him his master and a man of God, but remained closely associated with Eudoxius. ”

“ The eastern regions, however, from Cilicia to Phœnicia, were endangered by the heresy of Apolinarius. The heresy of Eunomius was spread from Cilicia and the mountains of Taurus as far as the Hellespont and Constantinople. These two heretics found it easy to attract to their respective parties the persons among whom they dwelt, and those of the neighborhood. ”

“ He held disputations with the Gnostics and other sects, practising medicine for a living. Finally he had Eunomius for his pupil and amanuensis (who founded the Eunomian sect) , and became at length bishop of Constantinople, where he died, and was buried by Eunomius, being at that time unpopular with the court party. He taught many heretical dogmas, one of which was, that faith alone, without works, was sufficient for the salvation of man. ”

“ And insolent and fierce men dwell there, Earthborn, a great marvel to the neighbours to behold; for each one has six mighty hands to lift up, two from his sturdy shoulders, and four below, fitting close to his terrible sides. And about the isthmus and the plain the Doliones had their dwelling, and over them Cyzicus son of Aeneus was king, whom Aenete the daughter of goodly Eusorus bare. But these men the Earthborn monsters, fearful though they were, in nowise harried, owing to the protection of Poseidon ”

“ Authors of heavenly love to many men.
LOVE.
The circumstances, too, that happened to Cratinus the Athenian, are very notorious. For he, being a very beautiful boy, at the time when Epimenides was purifying Attica by human sacrifices, on account of some old pollution, as Neanthes of Cyzicus relates in the second book of his treatise on [Pg 961] Sacrifices, willingly gave himself up to secure the safety of the woman who had brought him up. And after his death, Apollodorus, his friend, also devoted himself to death, and so the calamities of the country were terminated. ”

“ Cyzĭcus, a son of Œneus and Stilba, who reigned in Cyzicus. He hospitably received the Argonauts, in their expedition against Colchis. After their departure from the coast of Cyzicus, they were driven back in the night, by a storm, upon the coast; and the inhabitants seeing such an unexpected number of men, furiously attacked them, supposing them to be the Pelasgi, their ancient enemies. In this nocturnal engagement, many were killed on both sides, and Cyzicus perished by the hands of Jason himself, who honoured him with a splendid funeral, and raised a stately monument over his grave. ”

“ Besides these events of the time that seem worthy to chronicle in a history, the people of Cyzicus were once more deprived of their freedom because they had imprisoned certain Romans and because they had not completed the heroüm to Augustus that they had begun to build.—And the emperor would certainly have put to death the man who sold the emperor's statue along with his house and was brought to trial for the act, had not the consul asked the ruler himself to give his vote first. ”

“ He then exhorted them to seek another bishop for themselves, since he had been compelled to renounce his own opinion. But the inhabitants of Cyzicus loved and venerated him too much to think of losing him; they therefore refused to be subject to any other bishop, nor would they permit him to retire from his own church: and thus continuing under his oversight, they remained steadfast in their own heresy. ”

“ Chapter XXII.—Of Sisinnius Bishop of the Novatians. His Readiness at Repartee.
It will not be out of place here, I conceive, to give some account of Sisinnius. He was, as I have often said, [1]
a remarkably eloquent man, and well-instructed in philosophy. But he had particularly cultivated logic, and was profoundly skilled in the interpretation of the holy Scriptures; insomuch that the heretic Eunomius often shrank from the acumen which his reasoning displayed. ”

“ The teaching of the Anomoean school, led by Aetius and Eunomius, starting from the conception of God as ὁ ἀγέννητος, argued that between the ἀγέννητος and γέννητος there could be no essential, but at best only a moral, resemblance. “As the Unbegotten, God is an absolutely simple being; an act of generation would involve a contradiction of His essence by introducing duality into the Godhead.” ”

“ Impatient of the limits of the Euxine, they steered their destructive course from the Cimmerian to the Thracian Bosphorus. When they had almost gained the middle of the Straits, they were suddenly driven back to the entrance of them; till a favorable wind, springing up the next day, carried them in a few hours into the placid sea, or rather lake, of the Propontis. Their landing on the little island of Cyzicus was attended with the ruin of that ancient and noble city. ”

“ Eunomius died soon after this contention; and the Eunomian president, at Constantinople, refused to receive Eutychus into communion; for he antagonized him from jealousy because he was not even of clerical rank, and because he could not answer his arguments, and did not find it possible to solve his problems. Eutychus, therefore, separated those who had espoused his sentiments into a personal heresy. Many assert that he and Theophronius were the first who propounded the peculiar views entertained by the Eunomians concerning divine baptism. ”

“ For both these terms being used of the Divine Life in a distinct sense, in their case also Eunomius’ skill will embellish the same absurdity. For if His being always as He is is signified by the term immutable, and if the term incorporeal represents the spirituality of His essence, Eunomius will certainly say the same here also, that the terms are irreconcilable, and alien to each other, and that the notions which our minds attach to them have no point of contact one with the other; for insofar as God is always the same He is immutable, but not incorporeal ”

“ Wherefore we may justly entitle her the Key, not only of the Black Sea, but also of the Propontis and the Mediterranean Sea. Cyzicus (now called Chazico) is highly in Esteem, for that it joins by two Bridges the Island to the Continent, and unites two opposite Bays, and is, as Aristides informs us, the Bond of the Black, and the Mediterranean Sea; but any Man, who has his Eyes in his Head, may see, that ’tis but a very weak one. ”

“ The favourite of Justinian was sacrificed to conjugal tenderness or domestic tranquillity; the conversion of a prefect into a priest extinguished his ambitious hopes, but the friendship of the emperor alleviated his disgrace, and he retained, in the mild exile of Cyzicus, an ample portion of [78] his riches. Such imperfect revenge could not satisfy the unrelenting hatred of Theodora; the murder of his old enemy, the bishop of Cyzicus, afforded a decent pretence; and Joannes of Cappadocia, whose actions had deserved a thousand deaths, was at last condemned for a crime of which he was innocent. ”

“ In this nocturnal engagement the slaughter was great, and Cyzicus was killed by the hand of Jason, who, to expiate the murder he had ignorantly committed, buried him in a magnificent manner, and offered a sacrifice to the mother of the gods, to whom he built a temple on mount Dindymus. From Cyzicum they visited Bebrycia, otherwise called Bithynia, where Pollux accepted the challenge of Amycus king of the country in the combat of the cestus, and slew him. ”

“ Under the Byzantines it became the capital of the province of Hellespont and the metropolitan see of Mysia and of all the territory of Troy. On Mount Dyndimos, at the gates of Cyzicus, arose the temple of the great mother, the goddess Ida, whose worship had been established by the Argonauts, and who was venerated at Cyzicus as at Pessinunte, in the form of an aërolite, a sacred stone, which under the reign of King Attalus was carried to Rome, and installed in the city by all the matrons, preceded by Scipio the Younger. ”

“ Now seeing that the Only-begotten is in the Divine Scriptures proclaimed to be God, let Eunomius consider his own argument, and condemn for utter folly the man who parts the Divine into created and uncreated, as he does him who divides “man” into “horse” and “man.” For he himself says, a little further on, after his intermediate nonsense, “the close relation of names to things is immutable,” where he himself by this statement assents to the fixed character of the true connection of appellations with their subject. ”

“ XV ON THE GRAVE OF AN ATHENIAN WOMAN AT CYZICUS ERYCIUS I am an Athenian woman; for that was my city; but from Athens the wasting war-god of the Italians plundered me long ago and made a Roman citizen; and now that I am dead, seagirt Cyzicus wraps my bones. Fare thou well, O land that nurturedst me, and thou that thereafter didst hold me, and thou that at last hast taken me to thy breast.
XVI ON A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR PLATO I am the tomb of one shipwrecked; and that opposite me, of a husbandman; for a common Hades lies beneath sea and earth. ”

“ Cyzicus was deprived of its libertas for having flogged and put to death some Roman citizens, and the same punishment was awarded for their internal disorders to Tyre and Sidon, whose ancient liberties had been secured to them by Antony when he handed over the country to Cleopatra. ”

“ When we deny proper being to it, we must perforce affirm of it all the opposite terms. That which cannot be properly said is improperly said, so that the demonstration of its not being properly said is a proof of its not really subsisting: and it is at this that Eunomius seems to aim in introducing these new names into his teaching. For no one can say that he has strayed from ignorance into some silly fancy of separating, locally, the supreme from that which is below, and assigning to the Father as it were the peak of some hill, while he seats the Son lower down in the hollows. ”

“ The Athenians slew great numbers of their enemies, won much spoil, and took all their ships. They also made themselves masters of Cyzicus, which was deserted by Pharnabazus, and destroyed its Peloponnesian garrison, and thereby not only secured to themselves the Hellespont, but by force drove the Lacedaemonians from out of all the rest of the sea. They intercepted some letters written to the ephors, which gave an account of this fatal overthrow, after their short laconic manner. "Our hopes are at an end. Mindarus is slain. The men starve. We know not what to do." ”

“ When he died he was an old man, and he outlived his brother Maximus.
In those days many famous physicians flourished, among whom was ZENO OF CYPRUS, who established a celebrated school of medicine. Nay, he survived down to the time of Julian the sophist, and after him there were contemporaries of Prohaeresius who were the successors of Zeno. He had trained himself in oratory as well as in the practice of medicine. Of his famous pupils some took up one or other of these professions, thus dividing among them what they had learned from him ”

“ Yet Eunomius, while on every occasion, where he can insult our devout and God-adoring conceptions of the Son, he asserts in plain words the Son’s inferiority, establishes His superiority unconsciously in this device of his for knowing the Deity; for he assumes that the Father’s being lends itself the more readily to our comprehension, and then attempts to trace and argue out the Son’s nature from that. ”

“ Apollodorus, bk. 1, ch. 9.—Flaccus.—Apollonius.—Orpheus.――The chief town of the island of Cyzicum, built where the island is joined by the bridges to the continent. It has two excellent harbours, called Panormus and Chytus. The former is naturally large and beautiful, and the other owes all its conveniences to the hand of art. The town is situate partly on a mountain, and partly in a plain. The Argonauts built a temple to Cybele in the neighbourhood. It derives its name from Cyzicus, who was killed there by Jason. ”

“ Elected general by the troops, he effected the recall of Alcibiades and assisted him in the ensuing naval campaigns. By his brave defence at Cynossema (411) he won the battle for Athens, and in 410 contributed towards the brilliant victory of Cyzicus. ”

“ But if any one should grant Eunomius the right to fashion his words at his own will, as he desires, even though Scripture does not agree with him, let him tell us what works of the Father there are of which he says that the Son was made the seal, apart from those that have been wrought by the Son. All things visible and invisible are the work of the Son: in the visible are included the whole world and all that is therein ”