16 (168). Against Eunomius, the Heretic
LETTERS
you and send them back completely gratified, proclaiming your courtesy and realizing that our intercession with your unsurpassed Honor was not unavailing.
16. Against Eunomius, the H eretic 1 He who says that it is possible to attain to a knowledge of things really existing has, no doubt, directed his process of thought by some method and orderly procedure having its inception in his actual knowledge of existing things, and, after he has trained himself by the comprehension of objects rather insignificant and easily understood, he has simply advanced his perceptive faculty to the apprehension of that which is beyond all understanding.
Let him, therefore, who boasts that he has arrived at a knowledge of things actually existing explain the nature of the most trifling of visible objects. Let him expound the nature of the ant. Is its life sustained by breath and respiration? Is its body provided with bones? Is its framework braced with sinews and ligaments? Is the position of the sinews held secure by the covering of muscles and glands? Is the marrow stretched along the spinal vertebrae from the front of the head to the tail? Does it give the stimulating force to the members which have motion by its covering of sinewy membrane? Does it have a liver and a gall bladder near the liver; also kidneys, a heart, arteries and veins, membranes
I EllnomillS was the hishop of CyziCllS against whose Liber Apologeticus St. Basil wrote his Adversus Eunomium. However, this letter is similar almost word for word to a passage in the tenth book of St. Gregory of Nyssa's treatise against Eunomius written in 380 or 381. F. Diekamp.
'Einangehlicher Brief des hI. Basilills gegen Ellnomius: Theologische Quartalschrift 77 (1895) 277·285, considers it the work of St. Gregory.
Bessieres, op. cit. 349. also thinks that it is not by St. Basil