as sweet with honey, as we read in Philostratus, and at the hour when Christ converted water into wine at the wedding, the streams of the Nile were accustomed to be changed into wine, as St. Epiphanius affirms (Heresy 51: Its water is most fertile for the procreation of men and the fruits of the fields, as all who dwell nearby experience). The voice of the soldiers of Niger, encouraging them: "You have the Nile, do you seek wine?" sufficiently intimates that by drinking it, strength and vigor are fortified. It was discovered A that the Nile flows down from the Tigris and Euphrates through subterranean channels; indeed, the Holy Scriptures teach that it takes its rise from the terrestrial paradise.
But the Abbot Nilus draws religious streams from sacred books and strengthens souls for piety; and it is rightly written of him: *His breasts are better than wine*. He irrigates minds and renders them fruitful; and regarding him the prince of poets sings concerning Nestor: *sweeter than honey flows the speech* (µέλιτι γλυκίων ῥέεν αὐδή). For Your Highness, he portends all things most fortunate and propitious, whom your father and uncle—those from those Actian men who led forth so many triumphs B, brought back so many victories, and erected so many trophies—excite. That Mars of Italian leaders, Francesco II d'Este, Duke of Modena and Reggio, most celebrated in martial glory, was the sword and shield of our century. Your uncle, the most eminent Cardinal Francesco Barberini, is the singular glory and ornament of that assembly, than whom no one is more august in the Church: not to mention the providence and nobility of spirit of that superior uncle, Urban VIII, most glorious pontiff, or the prudence and sanctity of the most serene Duchess Lucretia Barberini, mother of Your Highness, for days and pens would fail me.
Receive, therefore, kindly and with that generous disposition with which you are endowed, oh magnanimous one, these gifts C and omens, while I, prostrating myself assiduously at the altars, pray to the all-powerful Deity that those gems of your virtues, bursting forth happily in the spring of your age, may bring forth fruits that are both more abundant and beneficial for the republic of letters and for the Church, and glorious for the most serene House of Este. And may this be the eternal guarantee of my perpetual devotion toward Your Highness.
Of Your most serene Highness, The most devoted and obedient servant, JOSEPH MARIA, formerly Bishop of Vaison.
CANDID READER
I was adorning a lexicographical book of various terms, which I had promised, divided into four distinct chapters—namely, prosopographical, theological, geographical, and grammatical—covering names, maxims, places, and abstruse words. But when I noticed that this volume had grown to the 706th page, and was exceeding the bulk I had proposed, I preferred to defer to another time both that four-part lexicographical book and the exegetical or critical work, as well as the various readings (which I had also promised) and the indices of Greek and Latin words and subjects, which had been prepared by a friend from my opuscula and my four lucubrations.
However, I thought it necessary to warn you, candid reader, lest you find it an offense to read here in the Works of Evagrius things ascribed to Nilus, namely about a hundred D *gnostic* maxims and the narrative concerning Pachomius and the dogmatic epistle. For even though those things were purely and simply Evagrius's, nonetheless they were corrected by Nilus, no less than the *Enchiridion* of Epictetus. And although in the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Act 18, p. 82 of the Crabbian edition) it is referred to in the Fifth Synod held under the Emperor Justinian at Constantinople against the impugners of God, Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius, that a sentence of condemnation was brought forth (likematter in the epistle of Pope Leo to Constantine Aug., p. 84; and Act 17, p. 72, above); yet, on p. 610, in the Index of the Works of Nilus, I have dealt more fully with Evagrius himself. Certainly even Tertullian's books *De fuga in persecutione*, *De exhortatione castitatis*, *De monogamia*, *De pudicitia*, and *Deque jejunio adversus Psychicos*, which were written by him when he was already a heretic (as St. Jerome warns in his book *De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis*), have been published against the Church, just as the book *De Trinitate*, which the same St. Jerome judges to be by Novatian, who was a schismatic; and they are read no less, just as Origen's *De principiis* (Περὶ ἀρχῶν), even though translated into Latin by Saint Jerome himself, abounds in errors condemned by the Church. Furthermore, Didymus's book *De Spiritu sancto*, which that same Jerome presented in Latin, is found among the Works of Saint Jerome, tom. VIII. Saint Augustine detected Commentaries on all the Epistles prepared by Pelagius, and in tom. IX the Epistle written in the name of Demetrias, and the Symbol to Damasus, and many other things, which it would take too long to enumerate; it is certain that they savor of Pelagianism, indeed even display it, and are the offspring of a very crafty heresiarch; yet they have been left behind and published. Thus, if the tares grow up to the harvest with the wheat (Matt. ch. XIII), so too do abrupt places and precipices lie adjacent to high and lofty things; vipers lurk beneath balsam trees; antimony grows with silver, and napellus with the antidote; indeed, from poisons comes the *Mithridaticum*, from harmful wild beasts and serpents comes the *theriac*, and from antimony the most present medicinal antidotes are prepared, and there is no volume so
A execrable, from which it is not permitted to draw and pluck something useful. In those opuscula of Evagrius, interpolated by Nilus, there is nothing alien to the faith of the most holy Church, nothing dissonant; and many assert that Evagrius did not so pertinaciously defend his depraved opinions, and if there was anything he had not corrected, it would have been amended by Nilus. For what is found in Nilus concerning the *agenēton* (unbegotten) and *genēton* (begotten), concerning *apatheia* (dispassion), concerning impossible precepts, and concerning Christ the Lord as man, can be explained just as it is set forth in other Fathers who have spoken with a sincere heart; in the Dogmatic Sermon, indeed, p. 359, chap. 2, it is read: 'O yàp ȧyévntov, xal yevrov (the printer wrongly printed *gennēton* with a double nu) έπεισάγων ἡμῶν τῇ πίστει, καὶ τὸν ἀεὶ ὄντα μὴ ὄντα ποτὲ δογματίζων, καὶ τὸν φύσει καὶ ἀεὶ υἱὸν, γενόμενον, καὶ τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον οὐκ ἀΐλιον, οὐκ ἀντικρύς ἐστι φιλισταίος βασκαίνων τοῖς (the text wrongly reads *tēs* for *tois*) τοῦ Πατριάρχου ἡμῶν προβάτοις; Which I rendered thus: "Since he who introduces into our faith that which is unbegotten and made, and dogmatically declares that He who always is, at some time did not exist, and that the Son who is by nature and always is, became made, and that the Holy Spirit is not eternal, is he not a Philistine, B envying the sheep of our patriarch from the opposite side?" etc. Nilus hints there either at Evagrius or an Arian, who affirmed that the Son was created and produced out of nothing; and that there was a time, or age, in which He did not exist; the impious and blasphemous Arius confesses this in a letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, in St. Epiphanius, lib. II Panar. p. 313: "We are persecuted because we said, 'The Son has a beginning, but God is without beginning,' for this reason we are persecuted, and because we said, 'He is from those things that were not.'" Add Suidas on "Arians" and "Arius." Philostorgius, lib. X *Hist. eccl.*, cap. 3, mentions a third sect of Arians who asserted that the Son was *ex ouk ontōn* (out of those things that were not), who were called *Exoukontioi* by St. Athanasius, lib. *De synodis*, p. 698, or 321, and Socrates, lib. II *Hist. eccles.*, c. 35. To the hymn of glorification (which is added to the Psalms as a password of Catholics, because, as St. Basil testifies in *De Spiritu Sancto* to Amphilochius, c. 7, 27, and 29, it was handed down to the Church by the apostles themselves along with the faith), an addition was made by the Nicene synod: "As it was in the beginning," etc., as is found in the first Council of Vaison under Constantius Augustus, over which Nectarius, Archbishop of Vienne, presided (the Vaison episcopate was then under him, as is clear from the first Council of Arles); that Vaison council C was held in the year of Christ 337, as Ado testifies in his *Chronicon*, and the most eminent Cardinal Bona excellently argues in *Divinæ psalmodiæ*, c. 16, p. 348, and I greatly wonder at Sirmond, who opposes Ado, but the same Cardinal acknowledges the canons were confused with the canons of other Vaison councils; therefore, you will find nothing here that is not Catholic and orthodox. The Arians could indeed mock, and substitute *agenēton*, that is, ingenerate, and *genēton*, that is, generate (for the Father is ingenerate, and the Son is begotten by the Father), and presently subject *agenēton*, that is, not made, and *genēton*, that is, made; just as they supposed *homoiousion* for *homoousion*, that is, of similar substance for "of the same." But this conjecture is mere, and Petavius speaks copiously about these words, tom. II *Theolog. dogmatic.*, lib. 1, c. 1, 2, and 3. About that word *Kuriakon*, namely *anthrōpon*, which is used, c. 9, sec. 4 of the *Peristeria* at the end, and which is translated (Dominicus homo, i.e., "Dominical man"), I know that St. Augustine, *Retractationum* lib. II c. 19, did not want to have said it, although he had read that certain Catholic expounders of divine Eloquies had used this to say it; the word was displeasing to St. Gregory Nazianzen and D St. Thomas Aquinas; yet St. Athanasius speaks thus in *Expositione fidei*, p. 55, and elsewhere; Facundus praises him, lib. XI, c. 2. St. Epiphanius used these expressions, *hæres.* 69; and in the *Ancoratus*, Cassianus, Marcus the Hermit, Anastasius Sinaita, and Rupert of Deutz. I can therefore place St. Nilus among those Fathers who wrote with a sincere heart, understanding it in a sane way, namely, that Christ, by reason of His humanity, is the temple and seat of the Divinity, just as Cardinal Bellarmine says, lib. III *De incarnatione*, c. 7, at the end, and Petavius, tom. IV *Theolog. dogmatic.*, lib. VI, c. 12. Concerning *apatheia*, about which Nilus thinks in *De malignis cogitationibus*, c. 3 throughout, I do not interpret it as the rigid and Socratic kind, which, with a word unknown to the Roman heaven, yet invented by Cicero, is called *indolentia* and *impatience*, or impassibility, but as the moderation of the passions, of which I noted in the Life of the same Nilus, p. 608. St. Nilus also brings up the difficulty of the precepts, and their impossibility, yet without grace; for possibility is from the grace of God, St. Augustine lib. III *De libero arbitrio*, St. Thomas 1, 2, quæst. 204, art. 4, and there Philip a Sanctissima Trinitate; Habertus, Bishop of Vabres, c. 15; *Theolog. Patrum de gratia*; more of these in the notes elsewhere. Concerning grace in the *Peristeria*, c. 4, at the end, sect. 12, some words smell of Pelagianism, but the clause of that section, c. 13, in which he acknowledges *panta pasin parechonta Theon* (God providing all things for all), removes every suspicion of Pelagianism, p. 231; but I will deal with these more fully in the notes, as I said, with God's help. Meanwhile, friendly reader, use these, enjoy them, and forgive a man in such a shortage of leisure, while these opuscula are sought out even to the point of reproach, and their edition is demanded very bitterly from all sides. I have attached a correction of errors by a friend; very many had crept into both the Greek and Latin texts; nor do I think everything is corrected, especially the accents, breathings, and punctuations. Kind reader (I beseech you), as I myself have taken pains in purging them, so may you take them in good part. Farewell.