Andrew Radde-Gallwitz: Eunomius’ Apologia Apologiae, Book II: Preliminary remarks to the edition

This presentation aims to reconstruct, insofar as is possible, the structure and argument of the second book of Eunomius of Cyzicus’ Apologia Apologiae, a book that contains his fullest extant meditations on divine revelation. The book’s sole surviving fragments are presented in the second book of Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius. In his second book, Eunomius responded to Basil’s Against Eunomius 1.5–10. While the polemical target of Eunomius’ second book is clear, its scope and structure are difficult to discern from Gregory’s citations, paraphrases, and summaries, especially because we lack the introduction and conclusion and any links between the fragments. In his edition of Eunomius’ Extant Works, Richard Vaggione offered two conflicting accounts of the book’s structure: a three-part, topical organization, and a nine-part arrangement in the order of Basil’s text. In the presentation’s first part, I will argue that the latter, textual organization makes the best sense of the surviving data. I will then briefly survey the main arguments whereby Eunomius defends himself and attacks Basil’s theory that human language is a human product. I will close with a largely neglected fragment (at Against Eunomius 2.398; GNO I, 342.21–30 Jaeger), showing that Eunomius’ argument is twofold: (1) the supposition that God directly instructed Adam and Eve in the use of names is the only intelligible explanation for our progenitors’ biblically attested use of language, and (2) the necessity of language for human life explains God’s providential intervention.