Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyric to Origen Argument 10.— Hence the Mere Word-Sages are Confuted…

I ask both the philosophers living today — those I know personally and those I have heard about from others — and everyone else to listen to what I am saying now without bias. Let no one think I speak this way because of friendship toward the man, or because I still depend on the other philosophers (I want to be, if anyone else is, a lover of them because of their words; I want to speak well of them and I am glad when I hear others speaking well of them). But these things are such that philosophy is almost despised by everyone and its very name is brought to an end, and I was about to choose to be a private person rather than learn anything from what these men proclaim — men to whom, because of the rest of their lives, it did not seem worthy to approach, perhaps not thinking this correctly). Let no one suppose that I say these things out of some ambition, either from praise toward the man or from another kind of ambition toward the outside philosophers. But also let us not seem to flatter by saying lesser things than their deeds deserve, and let us not speak empty words and names and clever expressions which they provide for themselves. For I, not even when I was a young man learning the common rhetoric of a rhetorician, endured willingly to praise or to give an encomium about something that was not true. So then not even now, when I am about to praise, do I think it necessary to extol him simply by the censures of others, or to speak badly of the man because of the faults of others so that I might have something greater to say about him by comparing his blessed life. We do not think in this way; but I will acknowledge what I have experienced, without any comparison or fabrication of words.