Your third reason, which you think the winning one, is proposed by you in these words, on page 255: that supposititious Dionysius, writing to Gaius the monk, calls him a therapeut, and in the canons of the Synod in Trullo, canon 43, you have “the ascetic life,” which the Latin translator renders “the therapeutic life.” Eusebius persuaded Dionysius that these Therapeutae, these “therapists,” were monks; and therefore that Pseudo-Dionysius, in order to lay claim to antiquity, used this name and betrayed his ignorance and fraud.
You are hunting with Diana very much against you. This is no battering ram to shake walls, but a spider’s web. The whole force of the argument is built upon the false supposition that Eusebius is older than this Dionysius, and that therefore this Dionysius was led into error by Eusebius and took the term from him, so that, as a substituted author, he might lie hidden beneath a fig-wood mask.
The fault in the reasoning is gross: begging the question, and taking as certain the very thing in dispute. That is what you do. For we insist on the contrary: that this Dionysius was older than Eusebius, and that Eusebius took the term from him and was persuaded by him that the name Therapeutae had formerly been customarily given to monks.
The presumption of so many centuries stands for us. Therefore it was for you to prove the contrary; and, if you please, the common error had to be refuted not by bare assertions but by solid reasons and by the authority of the ancients. That the life of the ancient monks was an ascetic life is very well known from Saints Basil, Nilus, Mark, and others. Nor, because the Latin translator rendered it “the therapeutic life,” would it therefore follow that Dionysius was later than Eusebius, or that the ancient monks were not called Therapeutae.
For the same life, from the difference of function, was called therapeutic and ascetic. The one name is proved from Dionysius and Eusebius; the other from Saint Basil, Nilus, and the Synod in Trullo. One name is so far from excluding the other. Your father was Burdo, but he was not therefore not called Julius Caesar.
Nor did Dionysius affect antiquity or desire to be considered a contemporary of the Apostles. He used the words of his own age, that is, the apostolic age, and therefore he disclosed no fraud or ignorance of his own. Rather Scaliger did what he usually does: he mixed falsehood with slander.
How many Lucretian phrases are found in Virgil? Yet if from that I tried to prove that the Lucretius we now have is supposititious, and that he was deceived by grammarians who cite certain Lucretian phrases, and that, in order to affect the antiquity of Virgil, he used these words, with how many acres of hellebore would your father have made me sane? If besides I were to say that it was not Virgil who borrowed from Lucretius, but Lucretius who borrowed those verses and words from Virgil, and that this theft, unknown to all for many centuries, was at last made public by me as informer, not by the little point of a lamp but by the spear of the sun, what great mockery would I owe you? How many thousands of laughs would you summon? How eagerly would you spit upon me, from the depth of your chest, thick and varicolored expectorations?
Such is your sharpness, and you argue no otherwise than I would then. Nevertheless, from here you fly off to songs of victory and sing a triumph before the victory. “No one,” you say, “who has any taste of letters and ancient Christianity has failed to notice that this Dionysius is supposititious.” And you repeat: “This much I know: there is no one with any taste of letters who does not detect the fraud; but whoever does not see it is a stock, a dolt, unskilled, and lacking all judgment in letters.”
I confess that I do not see it, and that I despise this censure of yours, Cato the Third. Rather I perceive and believe the contrary, and I congratulate myself that I am not alone lacking letters and ancient Christianity, according to Scaliger the innovator, and therefore, of course, the most learned and most loving student of letters and ancient Christianity; that I am not alone deprived of every taste of erudition; that I am not alone pronounced a stock, a dolt, unskilled, and empty of all judgment in letters. I have as companions, and as leaders of the line, Greek and Latin Fathers most learned and most praised through many centuries. A little later I shall summon them into a synod against this foreigner who so shamelessly casts reproaches upon Catholics.
What he is attempting by the authority of the Trullan codex and canon I have not yet been able sincerely to understand well enough. For what he seems to want, at any rate, he proves no more than if he were telling his dream. The forty-third canon of the Trullan Council reads as follows in the Greek exemplar supplied by a man of rather cultivated learning, Balfour the Scot, principal of the Aquitanian College of Bordeaux, just as the words were sent to me:
“It is permitted for every Christian to choose the ascetic life and, laying aside the tumult of worldly affairs, to enter a monastery and to be tonsured in the manner of a monk, in whatever fall he may have been found. For our Savior God says, ‘The one who comes to me I shall not cast out.’ Therefore, since the institution of monastic life depicts for us a life in repentance, we accept and favor the man who approaches it genuinely and sincerely, and no manner of life shall bring him an impediment preventing him from fulfilling his proper aim.”
So the common Latin translator renders it in the latest Venetian edition, which came out more correctly under Clement VIII, volume 3 of the Councils, page 300. It does not have “the therapeutic life,” as Scaliger says; I do not know what exemplar he used. But even if that translator had rendered it “therapeutic,” what then? Would it follow that monastic life first began then, and was not rather already begun and then left open to all, even to soldiers, even to criminals, who had sometimes been prohibited? However reckless you are, you will not dare to say that monastic life began then, that is, under Justinian the slit-nosed. All the Greeks and Latins would resist you.
Or do you think it follows that all writers who gave monks the name Therapeutae are later than Eusebius? What connection does this conclusion have with its antecedent? Or do you think it follows that all who called monks by this name affected the age and contemporaneity of Philo and the Areopagite? Whoever does not see that none of this follows from the Trullan canon, in which there is no named mention of the Therapeutae at all, certainly has no taste of logic. He is irrational; he must be a stock, a dolt, unskilled, and lacking every judgment in reasoning.
He boasts that he was the first to notice that passage of the Synod in Trullo. A discovery worthy of a statue, O Gorgias, but a leaden one. How many before you do you think had read it? But none of them was so acute or judicious as to gather from it what you did, because all the rest, compared with you, were mushrooms or melons. To whom would it not have seemed ridiculous that because in Greek monasticism is called the ascetic life, it could not then also be called the therapeutic life?
Indeed, it would have seemed ridiculous and childish to everyone to argue that because the Trullan Fathers used “ascetic,” and the Latin translator said “therapeutic,” therefore the word Therapeutae was only recently adapted to monks, though Eusebius too gives it to them. Scaliger admits that Eusebius so called them. But because the Latin translator of the Trullan Council used that term, he wishes to persuade us that from this Latin translator it can be gathered that the Greek Eusebius persuaded the Greek writer Dionysius that monks had once been so called: that is to say, that earlier men learned it from later men, Dionysius from Eusebius, Eusebius from the translator of the Trullan Council, and that they were deceived.
O sharpness! O wisdom! For if you did not mean this, come now, for what purpose did you so gloriously bring this siege-engine from Byzantium against us? Why did you not rather observe that these canons of the Trullan Council are so new that they were collected long after the Council itself? Why did you not notice that from the same Trullan Council these books are assigned to Dionysius?