(NOTE: The electronic text obtained from The Electronic Bible Society was
not completely corrected. EWTN has corrected all discovered errors. If you
find errors or omissions in the text, please notify [email protected].)

Transliteration of Greek words: All phonetical except: w = omega; h serves
three puposes: 1. = Eta; 2. = rough breathing, when appearing initially
before a vowel; 3. = in the aspirated letters theta = th, phi = ph, chi =
ch. Accents are given immediately after their corresponding vowels: acute =
' , grave = `, circumflex = ^. The character ' doubles as an apostrophe,
when necessary.


ST. JEROME

APOLOGY AGAINST THE BOOKS OF RUFINUS.

Addressed to Pammachius and Marcella from Bethlehem, A.D. 402.

[Translated by the Hon. and Rev. William Henry Fremantle, M.A., Canon of
Canterbury, Fellow and Tutor of Baliol College, Oxford.]


BOOK I.

   I have learned not only from your letter but from those of many others
that cavils are raised against me in the school of Tyrannus,[1] "by the
tongue of my dogs from the enemies by himself"[2] because I have translated
the books Peri` Archw^n into Latin. What unprecedented shamelessness is
this! They accuse the physician for detecting the poison: and this in order
to protect their vendor of drugs, not in obtaining the reward of innocence
but in his partnership with the criminal; as if the number of the offenders
diminished the crime, or as if the accusation depended on our personal
feelings not on the facts. Pamphlets are written against me; they are
forced on every one's attention; and yet they are not, openly published, so
that the hearts of the simple are disturbed, and no opportunity is given me
of answering. This is a new way of injuring a man, to make accusations
which you are afraid of sending abroad, to write what you are obliged to
hide. If what he writes is true why is he afraid of the public? if it is
false, why has he written it? We read when we were boys the words of
Cicero: "I consider it a lack of self-control to write anything which you
intend to keep hidden."[3] I ask, What is it of which they complain? Whence
comes this heat, this madness of theirs? Is it because I have rejected a
reigned laudation?[4] Because I refused the praise offered in insincere
words? Because under the name of a friend I detected the snares of an
enemy? I am called in this Pseface brother and colleague, yet my supposed
crimes are set forth openly, and it is proclaimed that I have written in
favour of Origen, and have by my praises exalted him to the skies. The
writer says that he has done this with a good intention. How then does it
come to pass that he now casts in my teeth, as an open enemy, what he then
praised as a friend? He declared that he had meant to follow me as his
predecessor in his translation, and to borrow an authority for his work
from some poor works of mine. If that was so, it would have been sufficient
for him to have stated once for all that I had written. Where was the
necessity for him to repeat the same things, and to force them on men's
notice by iteration, and to turn over the same words again and again, as if
no one would believe in his praises? A praise which is simple and genuine
does not show all this anxiety about its credit with the reader. How is it
that he is afraid that, unless he produces my own words as witnesses, no
one will believe him when he praises me? You see that we perfectly
understand his arts; he has evidently been to the theatrical school, and
has learned up by constant practice the part of the mocking encomiast. It
is of no use to put on a veil of simplicity, when the schemer is detected
in his malicious purpose. To have made a mistake once, or, to stretch the
point, even twice, may be an unlucky chancel but how is it that he makes
the supposed mistake with his eyes open, and repeats it, and weaves this
mistake into the whole tissue of his writings so as to make it impossible
for me to deny the things for which he praises me? A true friend who knew
what he was about would, after our previous misunderstanding and our
reconciliation, have avoided all appearance of suspicious conduct, and
would have taken care not to do through inadvertence what might seem to be
done advisedly. Tully says in his book of pleadings for 'Galinius': "I have
always felt that it was a religious duty of the highest kind to presence
every friendship that I have formed; but most of all those in which
kindness has been restored after some disagreement. In the case of
friendships which have never been shaken, if some attention has not been
paid, the excuse of forgetfulness, or at the worst of neglect is readily
accepted; but after a return to friendship, if anything is done to cause
offence, it is imputed not to neglect but to an unfriendly intention, it is
no longer a question of thoughtlessness but of breach of faith."So Horace
writes in his Epistle to Florus

   1. "Kindness, ill-knit, cleaves not but flies apart."

   2. What good does it do me that he declares on his oath that it was
through simplicity that he went wrong? His praises are, as you know, cast
in my teeth, and the laudation of this most simple friend (which however
has not much either of simplicity or of sincerity in it) is imputed to me
as a crime. If he was seeking a foundation of authority for what he was
doing, and wishing to shew who had gone before him in this path be had at
band the Confessor Hilary, who translated the books of Origen upon Job and
the Psalms consisting of forty thousand lines. He had Ambrose whose works
are almost all of them, full of what Origen has written; and the martyr
Victorinus, who acts really with 'simplicity,' and without setting snares
for others. As to all these he keeps silence; he does not notice those who
are like pillars of the church; but me, who am but like a flea and a man of
no account, he hunts out from corner to corner. Perhaps the same simplicity
which made him unconscious that he was attacking his friend will make him
swear that he knew nothing of these writers. But who will believe that he
does not know these men whose memory is quite recent, even though they were
Latins, being as he is such a very learned man, and one who has so great a
knowledge of the old writers, especially the Greeks, that, in his zeal for
foreign knowledge he has almost lost his own language?[2] The truth is it
is not so much that I have been praised by him as that those writers have
not been attacked. But whether what he has written is praise (as he tries
to make simpletons believe) or an attack, (as I feel it to be from the pain
which his wounds give me), he has taken care that I should have none of my
contemporaries to bring me honor by a partnership in praise, nor
consolation by a partnership in vituperation.

   3. I have in my hands your letter,[1] in which you tell me that I have
been accused, and expect me to reply to my accuser lest silence should be
taken as an acknowledgment of his charges. I confess that I sent the reply;
but, though I felt hurt, I observed the laws of friendship, and defended
myself without accusing my accuser. I put it as if the objections which one
friend had raised at Rome were being bruited about by many enemies in all
parts of the world, so that every one should think that I was replying to
the charges, not to the man. Will you tell me that another course was open
to me, that I was bound by the law of friendship to keep silence under
accusation, and, though I felt my face, so to say, covered with dirt and
bespattered with the filth of heresy, not even to wash it with simple
water, for fear that an act of injustice might be imputed to him. This
demand is not such as any man ought to make or such as any man ought to
accept. You openly assail your friend, and set out charges against him
under the mask of an admirer; and he is not even to be allowed to prove
himself a catholic, or to reply that the supposed heresy on which this
laudation is grounded arises not from any agreement with a heresy, but from
admiration of a great genius. He thought it desirable to translate this
book into Latin; or, as he prefers to have it thought he was compelled,
though unwilling, to do it. But what need was there for him to bring me
into the question, when I was in retirement, and separated from him by vast
intervals of land and sea? Why need he expose me to the ill-will of the
multitude, and do more harm to me by his praise than good to himself by
putting me forward as his example? Now also, since I have repudiated his
praise, and, by erasing what he had written, have shewn that I am not what
my friend declared, I am told that be is in a fury, and has composed three
books against me full of graceful Attic raillery, making those very things
the object of attack which he had praised before, and turning into a ground
of accusation against me the impious doctrines of Origen; although  in that
Preface in which he so landed me, he says of me: "I shall follow the rules
of translation laid down by my predecessors, and particularly those acted
on by the writer whom I have just mentioned. He has rendered into Latin
more than seventy of Origen's homiletical treatises, and a few also of his
commentaries on the Apostle; and in these, wherever the Greek text presents
a stumbling block, he has smoothed it down in his version and has so
emended the language used that a Latin writer can find no word that is at
variance with our faith. In his steps, therefore, I propose to walk, if not
displaying the same vigorous eloquence, at least observing the same rules."

   4. These words are his own, he cannot deny them. The very elegance of
the style and the laboured mode of speech, and, surpassing all these, the
Christian 'simplicity' which here appears, reveal the character of their
author. But there is a different phase of the matter: Eusebius, it seems,
has depraved these books; and now my friend who accuses Origen, and who is
so careful of my reputation, declares that both Eusebius and I have gone
wrong together, and then that we have held correct opinions together, and
that in one and the same work. But he cannot now be my enemy and call me a
heretic, when a moment before he has said that his belief was not dissonant
from mine. Then, I must ask him what is the meaning of his balanced and
doubtful way of speaking: "The Latin reader," he says, "will find nothing
here discordant from our faith." What faith is this which he calls his? Is
it the faith by which the Roman Church is distinguished? or is it the faith
which is contained in the works of Origen? If he answers "the Roman." then
we are the Catholics, since we have adopted none of Origen's errors in our
translations. But if Origen's blasphemy is his faith, then, though he tries
to fix on me the charge of inconsistency, he proves himself to be a
heretic. If the man who praises me is orthodox, he takes me, by his own
confession as a sharer in his orthodoxy. If he is heterodox, he shews that
he had praised me before my explanation because he thought me a sharer in
his error. However, it will be time enough to reply to these books of his
which  whisper in corners and made their venomous  attacks in secret, when
they are published and come out from their dark places into the  light, and
when they have been able to reach me either through the zeal of my friends
or the imprudence of my adversaries. We need not be much afraid or attacks
which their author fears to publish and allows only his confenderates to
read. Then and not till then will I either acknowledge the justice of his
charges, or refute them, or retort upon the accuser the accusations he has
made: and will shew that my silence has been the result not of a bad
conscience but of forbearance.

   5. In the meantime, I desired to free myself from suspicion in the
implicit judgment of the reader, and to refute the gravest of the charges
in the eyes of my friends. I did not wish it to appear that I had been the
first to strike, seeing that I have not, even when wounded: aimed a blow
against my assailant, but have only sought to heal my own wound. I beg the
reader to let the blame rest on him who struck the first blow, without
respect of persons. He is not content with striking; but, as if he were
dealing with a man whom he had reduced to silence and who would never speak
again, he has written three elaborate books and has made out from my works
a list of" Contradictions" worthy of Marcion. Our minds are all on fire to
know at once what his doctrine is and what is this madness of mine which we
had not expected. Perhaps he has learnt (though the time for it has been
short) all that is necessary to make him my teacher, and a sudden flow of
eloquence will reveal what no one imagined that he knew.

   [2] "Grant it, O Father; mighty Jesus, grant. Let him begin the
engagement hand to hand."

   Though he may brandish the spear of his accusations and hurl them
against us with all his might, we trust in tim Lord our Saviour that his
truth will encompass us as with a shield, and we shall be able to sing with
the Psalmist:[3] "Their blows have become as the arrows of the little
ones," and[4] "Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not
fear; though war should rise against me, even then will I he confident."
But of this at another time. Let us now return to the point where we began.
6. His followers object to me, (and

   [5]"Weary of work

   They ply the arms of Ceres,")

that I have translated into the Latin tongue the books of Origen Peri`
Archw^n, which are pernicious and repugnant to the faith of the Church. My
answer to them is brief and succinct: "Your letters, my brother Pammachius,
and those of your friends, have compelled me. You declared that these books
had been falsely translated by another, and that not a few things had been
interpolated or added or altered. And, lest your letters should fail to
carry conviction, you sent a copy of tiffs translation, together with the
Preface in which I was praised. As soon as I had run my eye over these
documents, I at once noticed that the impious doctrine enunciated by Origen
about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, to which the ears of Romans
could not bear to listen, had been changed by the translator so as to give
a more orthodox meaning. His other doctrines, on the fall of the angels,
the lapse of human souls, his prevarications about the resurrection, his
ideas about the world, or rather Epicurus's middle-spaces,[1] on the
restitution of all to a state of equality, and others much worse than
these, which it would take too long to recount, I found that he had either
translated as they stood in the Greek, or had stated them in a stronger and
exaggerated manner in words taken from the books of Didymus, who is the
most open champion of Origen. The effect of all this is that the reader,
finding that the book expressed the catholic doctrine on the Trinity, would
take in these heretical views without warning.

   7. One who was not his friend would probably say to him: Either change
everything which is bad, or else make known everything which you think
thoroughly good. If for the sake of simple Christians you cut out
everything which is pernicious and do not choose to put into a foreign
language the things that you say have been added by heretics; tell us
everything which is pernicious. But, if you mean to make a veracious and
faithful translation, why do yon change some things and leave others
untouched? You make an open profession in the prologue that you have
amended what is bad and have left all that is best: and therefore, if
anything in the work is proved to be heretical, you cannot enjoy the
license given to a translator but must accept the authority of a writer:
and you will be openly convicted of the criminal intent of besmearing with
honey the poisoned cup so that the sweetness which meets the sense may hide
the deadly venom. These things, and things ranch harder than these, an
enemy would say; and he would draw you before the tribunal of the church,
not as the translator of a bad work but as one who assents to its
doctrines. But I am satisfied with having simply defended myself. I
expressed in Latin just what I found in the Greek text of the books Peri`
Archw^n, not wishing the reader to believe what was in my translation, but
wishing him not to believe what was in yours. I looked for a double
advantage as the result of my work, first to unveil the heresy of the
author and secondly to convict the untrustworthiness of the translator.
And, that no one might think that I assented to the doctrine which I bad
translated, I asserted in the Preface how I had been compelled to make this
version and pointed out what the reader ought not to believe. The first
translation makes for the glory of the author, the second for his shame.
The one summons the reader to believe its doctrines, the other moves him to
disbelieve them. In that I am claimed against my will as praising the
author; in this I not only do not praise him, but am compelled to accuse
the man who does praise him. The same task has been accomplished by each,
but with a different intention: the same journey has had two different
issues. Our friend has taken away words which existed, alleging that the
books had been depraved by heretics: and he has put in those which did not
exist, alleging that the assertions had been made by the author in other
places; but of this he will never convince us unless he can point out the
actual places whence he says that he has taken them. My endeavour was to
change nothing from what was actually there; for my object in translating
the work was to expose the false doctrines which I translated. Do you look
upon me as merely a translator? I was more. I turned informer. I informed
against a heretic, to clear the church of heresy. The reasons which led me
formerly to praise Origen in certain particulars are set forth in the
treatise prefixed to this work. The sole cause which led to my translation
is now before the reader. No one has a right to charge me with the author's
impiety, for I did it with a pious intention, that of betraying the impiety
which had been commended as piety to the churches.

   8. I had given Latin versions, as my friend tauntingly says, of seventy
books of Origen, and of some parts of his Tomes, but no question was ever
raised about my work; no commotion was felt on the subject in Rome. What
need was there to commit to the ears of the Latins what Greece denounces
and the whole world blames? I, though translating many of Origen's work in
the course of many years, never created a scandal: but you, though unknown
before, have by your first and only work become notorious for your rash
proceeding. Your  Preface tells us that you have also translated  the work
of Pamphilus the martyr in defence of Origen; and you strive with all your
might to prevent the church from condemning a man whose faith the martyr
attests. The real fact is[1] that Eusebius Bishop of Caesarea, as I have
already said before, who was in his day the standard bearer of the Arian
faction, wrote a large and elaborate work in six books in defence of
Origen, showing by many testimonies that Origen was in his sense a
catholic, that is, in our sense, an Arian. The first of these six books you
have translated and assigned it to the martyr. I must not wonder,
therefore, that yon wish to make me, a shall man and of no account, appear
as an admirer of Origen, when you bring the same calumny against the
martyr. You change a few statements about the Son of God and the holy
Spirit, which yon knew would offend the Romans, and let the rest go
unchanged from beginning to end; you did, in fact, in the case of this
Apology of Pamphilus as you call it, just what you did in the translation
of Origen's Peri` Archw^n. If that book is Pamphilus's, which of the six
books is Eusebius's first? In the very volume which you pretend to be
Pamphilus's, mention is made of the later books. Also, in the second and
following books. Eusebius says that he had said such and such things in the
first book and excuses himself for repeating them. If the whole work is
Pamphilus's, why do you not translate the remaining books? If it is the
work of the other, why do you change the name? You cannot answer; but the
facts make answer of themselves: You thought that men would believe the
martyr, though they would have turned in abhorrence from the chief of the
Arians.

   9. Am I to say plainly what your intention was, my most simple-minded
friend? Do you think that we can believe that you unwittingly gave the name
of the martyr to the book of a man who was a heretic; and thus made the
ignorant, through their trust in Christ's witness, become the defenders of
Origen? Considering the erudition for which yon are renowned, for which you
are praised throughout the West; as an illustrious litterateur,[2] so that
the men of your party all speak of you as their Coryphaeus, I will not
suppose that you are ignorant of Eusebius'[3] Catalogue, which states the
fact that the martyr Pamphilus never wrote a single book.[1] Eusebius
himself, the lover and companion of Pamphilus, and the herald of his
praises, wrote three books in elegant language containing the life of
Pamphilus. In these he extols other traits of his character with
extraordinary encomiums, and praises to the sky his humility; but on his
literary interests he writes as follows in the third book: ''What lover of
books was there who did not find a friend in Pamphilus? If he knew of any
of them being in want of the necessaries of life, he helped them to the
full extent of his power. He would not only lend them copies of the Holy
Scriptures to read, but would give them most readily, and that not only to
men, but to women also if he saw that they were given to reading. He
therefore kept a store of manuscripts, so theft he might be able to give
them to those who wished for them whenever occasion demanded. He himself
however, wrote nothing whatever of his own, except private letters which he
sent to his friends, so humble was his estimate of himself. But the
treatises of the old writers he studied with the greatest diligence, and
was constantly occupied in meditation upon them."

   10. The champion of Origen, you see, the encomiast of Pamphilus,
declares that Pamphilus wrote nothing whatever, that he composed no single
treatise of his own. And you cannot take refuge in the hypothesis that
Pamphilus wrote this book after Eusebius's publication, since Eusebius
wrote after Pamphilus had attained the crown of martyrdom. What then can
you now do? The consciences of a great many persons have been wounded by
the book which yon have published under the name of the martyr; they give
no heed to the authority of the bishops who condemn Origen, since they
think that a martyr has praised him. Of what use are the letters of the
bishop Theophilus or of the pope Anastasius, who follow out the heretic in
every part of the world, when your book passing under the name of Pamphilus
is there to oppose their letters, and the testimony of the martyr can be
set against the authority of the Bishops? I think you had better do with
this mistitled volume what you did with the books Peri` Archw^n. Take my
advice as a friend, and do not be distrustful the power of your art; say
either that yon never wrote it, or else that it has been depraved by the
presbyter Eusebius.[1] It will be impossible to prove against you that the
book was translated by you. Your handwriting is not forthcoming to shew it;
your eloquence is not so great as that no one can imitate your style. Or,
in the last resort, if the matter comes to the proof, and your effrontery
is overborne by the multitude of testimonies, sing a palinode after the
manner of Stesichnus. It is better that you should repent of what you have
done than that a martyr should remain under calumny, and those who have
been deceived under error. And you need not feel ashamed of changing your
opinion; you are not of such fame or authority as to feel disgraced by the
confession of an error. Take me for your example, whom you love so much,
and without whom you can neither live nor die, and say what I said when you
had praised me and 12 defended myself.

   11. Eusebius the Bishop of Caesarea, of whom I have made mention above,
in the sixth book of his Apology for Origen makes the same complaint
against Methodius the bishop and martyr, which you make against me in your
praises of me. He says: How could Methodius dare to write now against
Origen, after having said this thing and that of his doctrines? This is not
the place in which to speak of the martyr; one cannot discuss every thing
in all places alike. Let it suffice for the present to mention that one who
was an Arian complains of the same things in a most eminent and eloquent
man, and a martyr, which you first make a subject of praise as a friend and
afterwards, when offended turn into an accusation. I have given you an
opportunity of constructing a calumny against me if you choose, in the
present passage. "How is it", you may ask, "that I now depreciate Eusebius,
after having in other places praised him?" The name Eusebius indeed is
different from Origen; but the ground of complaint is in both cases
identical. I praised Eusebius for his Ecclesiastical History, for his
Chronicle, for his description of the holy land; and these works[2] of his
I gave to the men of the same language as myself by translating them into
Latin. Am I to be called an Arian because Eusebius, the author of those
books, is an Arian? If you should dare to call me a heretic, call to mind
your Preface to the Peri` Archw^n, in which you bear me witness that I am
of the same faith with yourself: and I at the same time entreat you to hear
patiently the expostulation of one who was formerly your friend. You enter
into a warm dispute with others, and bandy mutual reproaches with men of
your own order; whether you are right or wrong in this is for you to say.
But as against a brother even a true accusation is repugnant to me. I do
not say this to blame others; I only say that I would not myself do it. We
are separated from one another by a vast interval of space. What sin had I
committed against you? What is my offence? Is it that I answered that I was
not an Origenist? Are you to be held to be accused because I defend myself?
If you say you are not an Origenist and have never been one, I believe your
solemn affirmation of this: if you once were one, I accept your repentance.
Why do you complain if I am what you say that you are? Or is my offence
this that I dared to translate the Peri` Archw^n after yon had done it, and
that my translation is supposed to detract from your work? But what was I
to do? Your laudation of me, or accusation against me, was sent to me. Your
'praise' was so strong and so long that, if I had acquiesced in it, every
one would have thought me a heretic. Look at what is said in the end of the
letter which I received from Rome:[1] "Clear yourself from the suspicions
which men have imbibed against you, and convict your accuser of speaking
falsely; for if you leave him unnoticed, you will be held to assent to his
charges." When I was pressed by such conditions, I determined to translate
these books, and I ask your attention to the answer which I made. It was
this:[2] "This is the position which my friends have made for me, (observe
that I did not say 'my friend,' for fear of seeming to aim at you); if I
keep silence I am to be accounted guilty: if I answer, I am accounted an
enemy. Both these conditions are hard; but of the two I will choose the
easier: for a quarrel can be healed but blasphemy admits of no
forgiveness." You observe that I felt this as a burden laid upon me; that I
was unwilling and recalcitrating; that I could only quiet my presentiment
of the quarrel which would ensue from this undertaking by the plea of
necessity. If you had translated the books Peri` Archw^n without alluding
to me, you would have a right to complain that I had afterwards translated
them to your prejudice. But now you have no right to complain, since my
work was only an answer to the attack you bad made on me under the guise of
praise; for what you call praise all understand as accusation. Let it be
understood between us that you accused me, and then you will not be
indignant at my having replied. But now suppose that you wrote with a good
intention, that you were not merely innocent but a most faithful friend,
out of whose mouth no untruth ever proceeded, and that it was quite
unconsciously that you wounded me. What is that to me who felt the wound Am
I not to take remedies for my wound because you inflicted it without evil
intention? I am stricken down and stricken through, with a wound in the
breast which will not be appeased; my limbs which were white before are
stained with gore; and you say to me: "Pray leave your wound untouched, for
fear that I may be thought to have wounded you." And vet the translation in
question is a reproof to Origen rather than to you. You altered for the
better the passages which you considered to have been Put in by the
heretics. I brought to light what the whole Greek world with one voice
attributes to him. Which of our two views is the truer it is not for me nor
for you to judge; let each of them be touched by the censor's rod of the
reader. The whole of that letter in which I make answer for myself is
directed against the heretics and against my accusers. How does it touch
you who profess to be both an orthodox person and my admirer, if I am a
little too sharp upon heretics, and expose their tricks before the public?
You should rejoice in my invectives: otherwise, if you are vexed at them,
you may be thought to be yourself a heretic. When anything is written
against some particular vice, but without the mention of any name, if a man
grows angry he accuses himself. It would have been the part of a wise man,
even if he felt hurt, to dissemble his consciousness of wrong, and by the
serenity of his countenance to dissipate the cloud that lay upon his heart.

   12. Otherwise, if everything which goes against Origen and his
followers is supposed to be said by me against you, we must suppose that
the letters of the popes Theophilus and Epiphanius and the rest of the
bishops which at their desire I lately translated(1) are meant to attack
you and tear you to pieces; we must suppose too that the rescripts of the
Emperors which order that the Origenists should be banished from Alexandria
and from Egypt have been written at my dictation. The abhorrence shown by
the Pontiff of the city of Rome against these men was nothing but a scheme
of mine. The outburst of hatred which immediately after your translation
blazed up through the whole world against Origen who before had been read
without prejudice was the work of my pen. If I have got all this power, I
wonder  that you are not afraid of me. But I really acted with extreme
moderation. In my public letter(1) I took every precaution to prevent your
supposing that anything in it was directed against you; but I wrote at the
same time a short letter(2) to you, expostulating with you on the subject
of your 'praises.' This letter my friends did not think it right to send
you, because you were not at Rome, and because, as they tell me, you and
your companions were scattering accusations of things unworthy of the
Christian profession about my manner of life. But I have subjoined a copy
of it to this book, so that you may understand what pain you gave me and
with what brotherly self-restraint I bore it.

   13. I am told, further, that you touch with some critical sharpness
upon some points of my letter, and, with the well-known wrinkles rising on
your forehead and your eyebrows knitted, make sport of me with a wit worthy
of Plautus, for having said that I had a Jew named Barabbas for my teacher.
I do not wonder at your writing Barabbas for Baranina, the letters of the
names being somewhat similar, when you allow yourself such a license in
changing the names themselves, as to turn Eusebius into Pamphilus, and a
heretic into a martyr. One must be cautious of such a man as you, and give
you a wide berth; otherwise I may find my own name turned in a trice, and
without my knowing it, from Jerome to Sardanapalus. Listen, then, O pillar
of wisdom, and type of Catonian severity. I never spoke of him as my
master; I merely wished to illustrate my method of studying the Holy
Scriptures by saying that I had read Origen just in the same way as I had
taken lessons from this Jew. Did I do you an injury because I attended the
lectures of Apollinarius and Didymus rather than yours? Was there anything
to prevent my naming in my letter that most eloquent man Gregory?(3) a
Which of all the Latins is his equal? I may well glory and exult in him.
But I only mentioned those who were subject to censure, so as to show that
I only read Origen as I had listened to them, that is, not on account of
his soundness in the faith hut on account of the excellence of his
learning. Origen himself, and Clement and Eusebius, and many others, when
they are discussing scriptural points, and wish to have Jewish authority
for what they say, write: "A Hebrew stated this to me," or "I heard from a
Hebrew," or, "That is the opinion of the Hebrews." Origen certainly speaks
of the Patriarch Huillus who was his contemporary, and in the conclusion of
his thirtieth Tome on Isaiah (that in the end of which he explains the
words(1) "Woe to Ariel which David took by storm") uses his exposition of
the words, and confesses that he had adopted through his teaching a truer
opinion than that which he had previously held. He also takes as written by
Moses not only the eighty-ninth Psalm(2) which is entitled "A prayer of
Moses the Man of God," but also the eleven following Psalms which have no
title according to Huillus's opinion; and he makes no scruple of inserting
in his commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures the views of the Hebrew
teachers.

   14. It is said that on a recent occasion where the letters of
Theophilus exposing the errors of Origen were read, our friend stopped his
ears, and along with all present pronounced a distinct condemnation upon
the author of so much evil; and that he said that up to that moment he had
never known that Origen had written anything so wrong. I say nothing
against this: I do not make the observation which perhaps another might
make, that it was impossible for him to be ignorant of that which he had
himself translated, and an apology for which by a heretic he had published
under the name of a martyr, whose defence also be had undertaken in his own
book; as to which I shall have some adverse remarks to make later on if I
have time to write them. I only make one observation which does not admit
of contradiction. If it is possible that he should have misunderstood what
he translated, why is it not possible that I should have been ignorant of
the book Peri` Archw^n which I had not before read, and that I should have
only read those Homilies which I translated, and in which he himself
testifies that there is nothing wrong? But if, contrary to his expressed
opinion, he now finds fault with me for those things for which he before
had given me praise, he will be in a strait between two; either he praised
me, believing me to be a heretic but confessing that he shared my opinion;
or else, if he praised me before as orthodox, his present accusations come
to nothing, and are due to sheer malice. But perhaps it was only as my
friend that he formerly was silent about my errors, and now that he is
angry with me brings to light what he had concealed.

   15. This abandonment of friendship gives no claim to my confidence; and
open enmity brings with it the suspicion of falsehood. Still I will be bold
enough to go to meet him, and to ask what heretical doctrine I have
expressed, so that I may either, like him, express my regret and swear that
I never knew the bad doctrines of Origen, and that his infidelity has now
for the first time been made known to me by the Pope Theophilus; or that I
may at least prove that my opinions were sound and that he, as his habit
is, had not understood them. It is impossible that in my Commentaries on
the Ephesians which I bear he makes the ground of his accusation, I should
have spoken both rightly and wrongly; that from the same fountain should
have proceeded both sweet water and bitter; and that whereas throughout the
work I condemned those who believe that souls have been created out of
angels, I should suddenly have forgotten myself and have defended the
opinion which I condemned before. He can hardly raise an objection to me on
the score of folly, since he has proclaimed me in his works as a man of the
highest culture and eloquence; otherwise such silly verbosity as he imputes
is the part, one would think, of a pettifogger and a babbler rather than of
an eloquent man. What is the point of his written accusations I do not
know, for it is only report of them, not the writings, which has reached
me; and, as the Apostle tells us it is a foolish thing to beat the air.
However, I must answer in the uncertainty till the certainty reaches me:
and I will begin by teaching my rival in my old age a lesson which I
learned in youth, that there are many forms of speech, and that, according
to the subject matter not only the sentences but the words also of writings
vary.

   16. For instance, Chrysippus and Antipater occupy themselves with
thorny questions: Demosthenes and Aeschines speak with the voice of thunder
against each other; Lysias and Isocrates have an easy and pleasing style.
There is a wonderful difference in these writers, though each of them is
perfect in his own line. Again: read the book of Tully To Herennius; read
his Rhetoricians; or, since he tells us that these books fell from his
hands in a merely inchoate and unfinished condition, look through his three
books On the orator, in which he introduces a discussion between Crassus
and Antony, the most eloquent orators of that day; and a fourth book called
The Orator which he wrote to Brutus when already an old man; and you will
realize that History, Oratory, Dialogue, Epistolary writing, and
Commentaries, have, each of them, their special style. We have to do now
with Commentaries. In those which I wrote upon the Ephesians I only
followed Origen and Didymus and Apollinarius, (whose doctrines are very
different one from another) so far as was consistent with the sincerity of
my faith: for what is the function of a Commentary? It is to interpret
another man's words, to put into plain language what he has expressed
obscurely. Consequently, it enumerates the opinions of many persons, and
says, Some interpret the passage in this sense, some in that; the one try
to support their opinion and understanding of it by such and such evidence
or reasons: so that the wise reader, after reading these different
explanations, and having many brought before his mind for acceptance or
rejection, may judge which is the truest , and, like a good banker, may
reject the money of spurious mintage. Is the commentator to be held
responsible for all these different interpretations, and all these mutually
contradicting opinions because he puts down the expositions given by many
in the single work on which he is commenting? I suppose that when you were
a boy you read the commentaries of Asper upon Virgil and Sallust, those of
Vulcatius upon Cicero's Orations, of Victorinus upon his Dialogues and upon
the Comedies of Terence, and also those of my master Donatus on Virgil, and
of others on other writers such as Plautus, Lucretius, Flaccus, Persius and
Lucan. Will you find fault with those who have commented on these writers
because they have not held to a single explanation, but enumerate their own
views and those of others on the same passage?

   17. I say nothing of the Greeks, since you boast of your knowledge of
them, even to the extent of saying that, in attaching yourself to foreign
literature, you have forgotten your own language. I am afraid that,
according to the old proverbs, I might be like the pig teaching Minerva,
and the man carrying fagots into the wood. I only wonder that, being as you
are the Aristarchus(1) of our time, you should have shewn ignorance of
these matters which every boy knows. It is, no doubt, from your mind being
fixed on the meaning of what you write, but partly also from your being so
sharp-sighted for the manufacture of calumnies against me, that you despise
the precepts of Grammarians and orators, that you make no attempt to set
straight words which have got transposed when the sentence has become
complicated, or to avoid some harsh collocation of consonants, or to escape
from a style full of gaps. It would be ridiculous to point to one or two
wounds when the whole body is enfeebled and broken. I will not select
portions for criticism; it is for him to select any portion which is free
from faults. He must have been ignorant even of the Socratic saying: "Know
thyself."

To steer the ship the untaught landsman fears;

Th' untrain'd attendant dares not give the sick

The drastic southernwood. The healing drug

The leech alone prescribes. Th' artificer

Alone the tools can wield. But poetry

Train'd or untrain'd we all at random write.(1)

   Possibly he will swear that he has never learned to read and write; I
can easily believe that without an oath. Or perhaps he will take refuge in
what the Apostle says of himself: "Though I be rude in speech, yet not in
knowledge." But his reason for saying this is plain. He had been trained in
Hebrew learning and brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, whom, though he had
attained apostolic rank, he was not ashamed to call his master; and he
thought Greek eloquence of no account, or at all events, in his humility,
he would not parade his knowledge of it. So that(2) 'his preaching should
stand not in the persuasive wisdom of words but in the power of the things
signified.' He despised other men's riches since he was rich in his own.
Still it was not to an illiterate man who stumbled in every sentence that
Festus cried, as he stood before his judgment seat:

   "Paul thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad." You
who can hardly do more than mutter in Latin, and who rather creep like a
tortoise than walk, ought either to write in Greek, so that among those who
are ignorant of Greek you may pass for one who knows a foreign tongue; or
else, if you attempt to write Latin, you should first have a grammar-
master, and flinch from the ferule, and begin again as an old scholar among
children to learn the art of speaking. Even if a man is bursting with the
wealth of Croesus and Darius, letters will not follow the money-bag. They
are the companions of toil and of labour, the associates of the fasting not
of the full-fed, of self-mastery not of self-indulgence.(4) It is told of
Demosthenes that he consumed more oil than wine, and that no workman ever
shortened his nights as he did. He for the sake of enunciating the single
letter Rho was willing to take a dog as his teacher; and yet you make it a
crime in me that I took a man to teach me the Hebrew letters. This is the
sort of wisdom which makes men remain unlearned: they do not choose to
learn what they do not know. They forget the words of Horace:

Why through false shame do I choose ignorance, Rather than seek to learn?

   That Book of Wisdom also which is read to us as the work of Solomon
says:(1) "Into a malicious soul wisdom shall not enter, nor dwell in the
body that is subject to sin. For the Holy Spirit of discipline(2) will flee
deceit and remove from thoughts which are without understanding." The case
is different with those who only wish to be read by the vulgar, and do not
care how they may offend the ears of the learned; and they despise the
utterance of the poet which brands the forwardness of noisy ignorance.

'Twas you, I think, whose ignorance in the streets Murder'd the wretched
strain with creaking reed.

   If you want such things, there are plenty of curly-pated fellows in
every school who will sing you snatches of doggrel from Miletus; or you may
go to the exhibition of the Bessi(3) and see people shaking with laughter
at the Pig's Testament, or at any jesters' entertainment where silly things
of this kind are run after. There is not a day but you may see the dressed-
up clown in the streets whacking the buttocks of some blockhead, or half-
pulling out people's teeth with the scorpion which he twists round for them
to bite. We need not wonder if the books of know-nothings find plenty of
readers.

   18. Our friends take it amiss that I have spoken of the Origenists as
confederated together by orgies of false oaths. I named the book in which I
had found it written, that is, the sixth book of Origen's Miscellanies, in
which he tries to adapt our Christian doctrine to the opinions of Plato.
The words of Plato in the third book of the Republic(4) are as follows:
"Truth, said Socrates, is to be specially cultivated. If, however, as I was
saying just now, falsehood is disgraceful and useless to God, to men it is
sometimes useful, if only it is used as a stimulant(3) or a medicine; for
no one can doubt that some such latitude of statement must be allowed to
physicians, though it must be taken out of the hands of those who are
unskilled. That is quite true, it was replied; and if one admits that any
person may do this, it must be the duty of the rulers of states at times to
tell lies, either to baffle the enemy or to benefit their country and the
citizens. On the other hand to those who do not know how to make a good
rise of falsehood, the practice should be altogether prohibited." Now take
the words of Origen: "When we consider the precept(1) 'Speak truth every
man with his neighbour,' we need not ask, Who is my neighbour? but we
should weigh well the cautious remarks of the philosopher. He says, that to
God falsehood is shameful and useless, but to men it is occasionally
useful. We must not suppose that God ever lies, even in the way of
economy;(2) only, if the good of the hearer requires it, he speaks in
ambiguous language, and reveals what he wills in enigmas, taking care at
once that the dignity of truth should be preserved and yet that what would
be hurtful if produced nakedly before the crowd should be enveloped in a
veil and thus disclosed. But a man on whom necessity imposes the
responsibility of lying is bound to use very great care, and to use
falsehood as he would a stimulant or a medicine, and strictly to preserve
its measure, and not go beyond the bounds observed by Judith in her
dealings with Holofernes, whom she overcame by the wisdom with which she
dissembled her words. He should act like Esther who changed the purpose of
Artaxerxes by having so long concealed the truth as to her race; and still
more the patriarch Jacob who, as we read, obtained the blessing of his
father by artifice and falsehood. From all this it is evident that if we
speak falsely with any other object than that of obtaining by it some great
good, we shall be judged as the enemies of him who said, I am the truth."
This Origen wrote, and none of us can deny it. And he wrote it in the book
which he addressed to the 'perfect,' his own disciples. His teaching is
that the master may lie, but the disciple must not. The inference from this
is that the man who is a good liar, and without hesitation sets before his
brethren any fabrication which rises into his mouth, shows himself to be an
excellent teacher.

   19. I am told that he also carps at me for the translation I have given
of a phrase in the Second Psalm. In the Latin it stands: "Learn
discipline," in the Hebrew it is written Nescu Bar; and I have given it in
my commentary, Adore the Son; and then, when I translated the whole Psalter
into the Latin language, as if I had forgotten my previous explanation, I
put "Worship purely." No one can deny, of course, that these
interpretations are contrary to each other; and we must pardon him for
being ignorant of the Hebrew writing when he is so often at a loss even in
Latin. Nescu, translated literally, is Kiss. I wished not to give a
distasteful rendering, and preferring to follow the sense, gave the word
Worship; for those who worship are apt to kiss their hands and to bare
their heads, as is to be seen in the case of Job who declares that he has
never done either of these things,(1) and says(2) "If I beheld the sun when
it shined or the moon walking in brightness, and my heart rejoiced in
secret and I kissed my hand with my mouth, which is a very great iniquity,
and a lie to the most high God." The Hebrews, according to the peculiarity
of their language use this word Kiss for adoration; and therefore I
translated according to the use of those whose language I was dealing with.
The word Bar, however in Hebrew has several meanings. It means Son, as in
the words Barjona (son of a dove) Bartholomew (son of Tholomaeus),
Bartimaeus, Barjesus, Barabbas. It also means Wheat, and A sheaf of corn,
and Elect and Pure. What sin have I committed, then, when a word is thus
uncertain in its meaning, if I have rendered it differently in different
places? and if, after taking the sense "Worship the Son" in my Commentary,
where there is more freedom of discussion, I said "Worship purely" or
"electively" in my version Of the Bible itself, so that I should not be
thought to translate capriciously or give grounds for cavil on the part of
the Jews. This last rendering, moreover, is that of Aquila and Symmachus:
and I cannot see that the faith of the church is injured by the reader
being shewn in how many different ways a verse is translated by the Jews.

   20. Your Origen allows himself to treat of the transmigration of souls,
to introduce the belief in an infinite number of worlds, to clothe rational
creatures in one body after another, to say that Christ has often suffered,
and will often suffer again, it being always profitable to undertake what
has once been profitable. You also yourself assume such an authority as to
turn a heretic into a martyr, and to invent a heretical falsification of
the books of Origen. Why may not I then discuss about words, and in doing
the work of a commentator teach the Latins what I learn from the Hebrews?
If it were not a long process and one which savours of boasting, I should
like even now to shew you how much profit there is in waiting at the doors
of great teachers, and in learning an art from a real artificer. If I could
do this, you would see what a tangled forest of ambiguous names and words
is presented by the Hebrew. It is this which gives such a field for various
renderings: for, the sense being uncertain, each man takes the translation
which seems to him the most consistent. Why should I take you to any
outlandish writers? Go over Aristotle once more and Alexander the
commentator on Aristotle; you will recognize from reading these what a
plentiful crop of uncertainties exists; and you may then cease to find
fault with your friend in reference to things which you have never had
brought to your mind even in  your dreams.

   21. My brother Paulinian tells me that our friend has impugned certain
things in my commentary on the Ephesians: some of these criticisms he
committed to memory, and has indicated the actual passages impugned. I must
not therefore refuse to meet his statements, and I beg the reader, if I am
somewhat prolix in the statement and the refutation of his charges, to
allow for the necessary conditions of the discussion. I am not accusing
another but endeavouring to defend myself and to refute the false
accusation of heresy which is thrown in my teeth. On the Epistle to the
Ephesians Origen wrote three books. Didymus and Apollinarius also composed
works of their own. These I partly translated, partly adapted; my method is
described in the following passage of my prologue: "This also I wish to
state in my Preface. Origen, you must know, wrote three books upon this
Epistle, and I have partly followed him. Apollinarius also and Didymus
published certain commentaries on it, from which I have culled some things,
though but few; and, as seemed to me right, I put in or took out others;
but I have done this in such a way that the careful reader may from the
very first see how far the work is due to me, how far to others." Whatever
fault there is detected in the exposition given of this Epistle, if I am
unable to shew that it exists in the Greek books from which I have stated
it to have been translated into Latin, I will acknowledge that the fault is
mine and not another's. However, that I should not be thought to be raising
quibbles, and by this artifice of self-excuse to be escaping from boldly
meeting him, I will set out the actual passages which are adduced as
evidences of my fault.

   22. To begin. In the first book I take the words of Paul:(1) "As he
hath chosen us before the foundation of the world, that we might be holy
and unspotted before him." This I have interpreted as referring not,
according to Origen's opinion, to an election of those who had existed in a
previous state, but to the foreknowledge of God; and I close the discussion
with these words:

   "His assertion that we have been chosen before the foundation of the
world that we should be holy and without blemish before him, that is,
before God, belongs to the foreknowledge of God, to whom all things which
are to be are already made, and are known before they come into being. Thus
Paul was predestinated in the womb of his mother: and Jeremiah before his
birth is sanctified, chosen, confirmed, and, as a type of Christ, sent as a
prophet to the Gentiles."

   There is no crime surely in this exposition of the passage. Origen
explained it in a heterodox sense, but I followed that of the church. And,
since it is the duty of a commentator to record the opinions expressed by
many others, and I had promised in the Preface that I would do this, I set
down Origen's interpretation, though without mentioning his name which
excites ill will.

   "Another," I said, "who wishes to vindicate the justice of God, and to
shew that he does not choose men according to a prejudgment and
foreknowledge of his own but according to the deserts of the elect, thinks
that before the visible creation of sky, earth, sea and till that is in
them, there existed the invisible creation, part of which consisted of
souls, which, for certain causes known to God alone, were cast down into
this valley of tears, this scene of our affliction and our pilgrimage; and
that it is to this that we may apply the Psalmist's prayer, he being in
this low condition and longing to return to his former dwelling place:(2)
"Woe is me that my sojourn is prolonged; I have inhabited the habitations
of Kedar, my soul hath had a long pilgrimage." And also the words of the
Apostle:(3) "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body
of this death?" and(4) "It is better to return and to be with Christ;"
and(5) "Before I was brought low, I sinned." He adds much more of the same
kind."

   Now observe that I said "Another who wishes to vindicate," I did not
say "who succeeds in vindicating." But if you find a stumbling block in the
fact that I condensed a very  long discussion of Origen's into a brief
statement so as to give the reader a glimpse of his meaning; if you declare
me to be a secret adherent of his because I have not left out anything
which he has said, I would ask you whether it was not necessary for me to
do this, so as to avoid your cavils. Would you not otherwise have declared
that I had kept silence on matters on which he had spoken boldly, and that
in the Greek text his assertions were much stronger than I represented? I
therefore put down all time I found in the Greek text, though in a shorter
form, so that his disciples should have nothing which they could force upon
the  ears of the Latins as a new thing; for it is easier for us to make
light of things which we know well than of things which take us unprepared.
But after I had shewn Origen's interpretations of the passage, I concluded
this section with words to which I beg your attention:

   "The Apostle does not say 'He chose us before the foundation of the
world because we were then holy and without blemish;' but 'He chose us that
we might be holy and without blemish,' that is, that we who before were not
holy and without blemish might afterwards become such. This expression will
apply even to sinners who turn to better things; and thus the words remain
true, 'In thy sight shall no man living be justified,' that is, no one in
his whole life, in the whole of the time that he has existed in the world.
If the passage be thus understood, it makes against the opinion that before
the foundation of the world certain souls were elected because of their
holiness, and that they had none of the corruption of sinners. It is
evident that Paul and those like him were not elected because they were
holy and without blemish, but they were elected and predestinated so that
in their after life, by means of their works and their virtues, they should
become holy and  without blemish."

   Does any one dare, then, after this statement of my opinion, to accuse
me of assent to the heresy of Origen? It is now almost eighteen years since
I composed those books, at a time when the name of Origen was highly
esteemed in the world, and when as yet his work the Peri` Archw^n had not
reached the ears of the Latins: and yet I distinctly stated my belief and
pointed out what I did not agree with. Hence, even if my opponent could
have pointed out anything heretical in other places, I should be held
guilty only of the fault of carelessness, not of the perverse doctrines
which both in this place and in my other works I have condemned.

   23. I will deal shortly with the second passage which my brother tells
me has been marked for blame, because the complaint is exceedingly
frivolous, and bears on its face its calumnious character. The passage(1)
is that in which Paul declares that God "made him to sit at his right hand
in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and
dominion, and every, name that is named, not only in this world but also in
that which is to come." After stating various expositions which have been
given, I came to the offices of the ministers of God, and spoke of the
principalities and powers, the virtues and dominions: and I add:

   "They must assuredly have others who are subject to them, who are under
their power and serve them, and are fortified by their authority: and this
distribution of offices will exist not only in the present world but in the
world to come, so that each individual will rise or fall from one step of
advancement and honour to another, some ascending and some descending, and
will come successively under each of these powers, virtues, principalities,
and dominions."

   I then went on to describe the various divine offices and ministries
after the similitude of the palace of an earthly king, which I fully
described; and I added:

   "Can we suppose that God the Lord of lords and King of kings, is
content with a single order of servants? We speak of an archangel because
there are other angels of whom he is chief: and so there would be nothing
said of Principalities, Powers and Dominions unless it were implied that
there were others of inferior rank."

   But, if he thinks that I became a follower of Origen because I
mentioned in my exposition these advancements and honours, these ascents
and descents, increasings and diminishings; I must point out that to say,
as Origen does, that Angels and Cherubim and Seraphim are turned into
demons and men, is a very different thing from saying that the Angels
themselves have various offices allotted to them,--a doctrine which is not
repugnant to that of the church. Just as among men there are various
degrees of dignity distinguished by the different kinds of work, as the
bishop, the presbyter and the other Ecclesiastical grades have each their
own order, while yet all are men; so we may believe that, while they all
retain the dignity of Angels, there are various degrees of eminence among
them, without imagining that angels are changed into men, and that men are
new-made into angels.

   24. A third passage with which he finds fault is that in which I gave a
threefold interpretation of the Apostle's words:(1) "That in the ages to
come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness towards us
in Christ Jesus." The first was my own opinion, the second the opposite
opinion held by Origen, the third the simple explanation given by
Apollinarius. As to the fact that I did not give their names, I must ask
for pardon on the ground that it was done through modesty. I did not wish
to disparage men whom I was partly following. and whose opinions I was
translating into the Latin tongue. But, I said, the diligent reader will at
once search into these things and form his own opinion. And I repeated at
the end: Another turns to a different sense the words 'That in the ages to
come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace.' "Ah," you will say,
"I see that in the character of the diligent reader you have unfolded the
opinions of Origen." I confess that I was wrong. I ought to have said not
The diligent but The blasphemous reader. If I had anticipated that you
would adopt measures of this kind I might have done this, and so have
avoided your calumnious speeches. It is, I suppose, a great crime to have
called Origen a diligent reader, especially when I had translated seventy
books of his and had praised him up to the sky,-- for doing which I had to
defend myself in a short treatise(1) two years ago in answer to your
trumpeting of my praises. In those 'praises' which you gave me you laid it
to my charge that I had spoken of Origen as a teacher of the churches, and
now that you speak in the character of an enemy you think that I shall be
afraid because you accuse me of calling him a diligent reader. Why, even
shopkeepers who are particularly frugal, and slaves who are not wasteful,
and the care-takers who made our childhood a burden to us and even thieves
when they are particularly clever, we speak of as diligent; and so the
conduct of the unjust steward in the Gospel is spoken of as wise.
Moreover(2) "The children of this world are wiser than the children of
light," and(3) "The serpent was wiser than all the beasts which the Lord
had made on the earth."

   25. The fourth ground of his censure is in the beginning of my Second
Book, in which I expounded the statement which St. Paul makes "For this
cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles." The passage
in itself is perfectly plain; and I give, therefore, only that part of the
comment on it which lends itself to malevolent remark:

   "The words which describe Paul as the prisoner of Jesus Christ for the
Gentiles may be understood of his martyrdom, since it was when he was
thrown into chains at Rome that he wrote this Epistle, at the same time
with those to Philemon and the Colossians and the Philippians, as we have
formerly shewn. Certainly we might adopt another sense, namely, that, since
we find this body in several places called the chain of the soul, in which
it is held as in a close prison, Paul may speak of himself as confined in
the chains of the body, and so that he could not return and be with Christ;
and that thus he might perfectly fulfil his office of preaching to the
Gentiles. Some commentators, however, introduce another idea namely, that
Paul, having been predestinated and consecrated from his mother's womb, and
before he was born, to be a preacher to the Gentiles afterwards took on the
chains of the flesh."

   Here also, as before, I gave a three fold exposition of the passage: in
the first my own view, in the second the one supported by Origen, and the
third the opinion of Apollinarius going contrary to his doctrine. Read over
the Greek commentaries. If you do not find the fact to be as I state it, I
will confess that I was wrong. What is my fault in this passage? The same,
I presume, as that to which I made answer before, namely, that I did not
name those whose views I quoted. But it was needless at each separate
statement of the Apostle to give the names of the writers whose works I had
declared in the Preface that I meant to translate. Besides, it is not an
absurd way of understanding the passage, to say that the soul is bound in
the body until Christ returns and, in the glory of the resurrection,
changes our corruptible and mortal body for incorruption and immortality:
for it is in this sense that the Apostle uses the expression, "O wretched
man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" calling
it the body of death because it is subject to vices and diseases, to
disorders and to death; until it rises with Christ in glory, and, having
been nothing but fragile clay before, becomes baked by the heat of the holy
Spirit into a jar of solid consistency, thus changing its grade of glory,
though not its nature.

   26. The fifth passage selected by him for blame is the most important,
that in which I explain the statement of the Apostle.(1) "From whom all the
body fitly framed anti knit together through every juncture of
ministration, according to the working in due measure of every several
part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in
love." Here I summed up in a short sentence Origen's exposition which is
very long and goes over the same ideas in various words; yet so as to leave
out none of his illustrations or his assertions. And when I had come to the
end, I added:

   "And so in the restitution of sit things, when Jesus Christ the true
physician comes to restore to health the whole body of the Church, which
now lies scattered and rent, every one will receive his proper place
according to the measure of his faith and his recognition of the Son of God
(the word 'recognize' implies that he had formerly known him and afterwards
had ceased to know him), and shall then begin to be what he once had been;
yet not in such a way as that, as held by another heresy, all should be
placed in one rank, and, by a renovating process, all become angels; but
that each member, according to its own measure and office shall become
perfect: for instance, that the apostate angel shall begin to be that which
he was by his creation, and that man who had been cast out of paradise
shall be restored again to the cultivation of paradise;" and so on.

   27. I wonder that you with your consummate wisdom have not understood
my method of exposition. When I say, 'But not in such a way that, as held
by another heresy, all should be placed in one rank, that is, all by a
reforming process become angels, 'I clearly shew that the things which I
put forward for discussion are heretical, and that one heresy differs from
the other. Which (do you ask?) are the two heresies? The one is that which
says that all reasonable creatures will by a reforming process become
angels; the other, that which asserts that in the restitution of the world
each thing will become what it was originally created; as for instance that
devils will again become angels, and that the souls of men will become such
as they were originally formed; that is, by the reforming process will
become not angels but that which God originally made them, so that the just
and the sinners will be on an equality. Finally, to shew you that it was
not my own opinion which I was developing but two heresies which I was
comparing with one another, both of which I had found stated in the Greek,
I completed my discussion with this ending:

   "These things, as I have said before, are more obscure in our tongue
because they are put in a metaphorical form in Greek; and in every
metaphor, when a translation is made word for word from one language into
another, the budding sense of the word is choked as it were with brambles."

   If you do not find in the Greek the very thought which I have
expressed, I give you leave to treat all that I say as my own.

   28. The sixth and last point which I am told that he brings against me
(that is if my brother has not left anything unreported) is that, in the
interpretation of the Apostle's words,(1) "He that loveth his wife loveth
himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth
it, even as Christ also the church," after my own simple explanation I
propounded the question raised by Origen, speaking his views though without
mentioning his name, and saying:

   "I may be met by the objection that the statement of the Apostle is not
true when he says that no man hates his own flesh, since those who labour
under the jaundice or consumption or cancer Or abscesses, prefer death to
life, and hate their own bodies;" and my own opinion follows immediately:
"The words, therefore, may be more properly taken in a metaphorical sense."

   When I say metaphorical, I mean to shew that what is said is not
actually the case, but that the truth is shadowed forth through a mist of
allegory. However, I will set out the actual words which are found in
Origen's third book: "We may say that the soul loves that flesh which is to
see the salvation of God, that it nourishes and cherishes it, and trains it
by discipline and satisfies it with the bread of heaven, and gives it to
drink of the blood of Christ: so that it may become we through wholesome
food, and may follow husband freely, without being weighed down by any
weakness. It is by a beautiful image that the soul is said to nourish and
cherish the body as Christ nourishes and cherishes the church, since it was
he who said to Jerusalem:(2)

   "How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her wings and thou wouldst not;" and that thus
this corruptible may put on incorruption, and that being poised lightly, as
upon wings, may rise more easily into the air. Let us men then cherish our
wives, and let our souls cherish our bodies in a way as that wives may be
turned into men and bodies into spirits, and that there may be no
difference of sex, but that, as among the angels there is neither male nor
female, so we, who are to be the Angels, may begin to be here what it is
promised that we shall be in heaven."

   29. The simple explanation of my own opinion in reference to the
passage I stated before in these words:

   "Taking the simple sense of the words, we have a command, following on
the precept of mutual kindness between man and wife, that we should nourish
and cherish our wives: that is, that we should supply them with the food
and clothing which are necessary."

   This is my own understanding of the passage. Consequently, my words
imply that all that follows after and might be brought up against me must
be understood as spoken not as my own view but that of my opponents. But it
might be thought that my resolution of the difficulty of the passage is too
short and peremptory, and that it wraps the true sense, according to what
has been said above, in the darkness of allegory, so as to bring it clown
from its true meaning to one less rue. I will therefore come  nearer to the
matter, and ask what there is in the other interpretation with which you
need disagree. It is this I suppose, that I said that souls should cherish
their bodies as men cherish their wives, so that this corruptible may put
on incorruption, and that, being lightly poised as upon wings, it may rise
more easily into the air. When I say that this corruptible must put on
incorruption, I do not change the nature of the body, but give it a higher
rank in the scale of being. And so as regards what follows, that, being
lightly poised as upon wings, it may more easily rise into the air: He who
gets wings, that is, immortality, so that he may fly more lightly up to
heaven, does not cease to be what he had been. But you may say, I am
staggered by what follows:

   "Let us men then cherish cur wives, and let our souls cherish our
bodies, in such away as that wives may be turned into men and bodies into
spirits, and that there may be no difference of sex, but that, as among the
angels there is neither male nor female, so we, who are to be like the
angels, may begin to be on earth what it is promised that we shall be in
heaven."

   You might justly be staggered, if I had not after what goes before,
said "We may begin to be what it is promised that we shall be in heaven."
When I say, "We shall begin to be on earth," I do not take away the
difference of sex; I only take away lust, and sexual intercourse, as the
Apostle does when he says, "The time is short; it remaineth therefore that
those who have wives be as though they had none;" and as the Lord implied
when, in reply to the question of which of the seven brothers the woman
would be the wife, he answered:(1) "Ye err, not knowing the Scriptures nor
the power of God; for in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be
given in marriage: but they shall be as the angels of God." And, indeed,
when chastity is observed between man and woman, it begins to be true that
there is neither male nor female; but, though living in the body, they are
being changed into angels, among whom there is neither male nor female.

The same is said by the same Apostle in another place:(1) "As many of you
as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ. There can be neither Jew
nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and
female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

   30. But now, since my pleading has steered its course out of these
rough and broken places, and I have refuted the charge of heresy which bad
been urged against me by looking my accuser freely in the face, I will pass
on to the other articles of charge with which he tries to assail me. The
first is that I am a scurrilous person, a detractor of every one; that I am
always snarling and biting at my predecessors. I ask him to name a single
person whose reputation I have disparaged, or whom, according to an art
practised by my opponent. I have galled by pretended praise. But, if I
speak against ill-disposed persons, and wound with the point of my pen some
Luscius Lanuvinus(2) or an Asinius Pollio of the race of the Cornelii,(3)
if I repel the attacks of a man of boastful and curious spirit, and aim all
my shafts at a single butt, why does he divide with others the wounds meant
for him alone? And why is he so unwise as to shew, by the irritation of his
answer to my attack, his consciousness that it is he alone whom the cap
fits?

   He brings against me the charge of perjury and sacrilege together,
because, in a book written for the instruction of one of Christ's virgins,
I describe the promise which I once made when I dreamed that I was before
the tribunal of the Judge, that I would never again pay attention to
secular literature, and that nevertheless I have sometimes made mention of
the learning which I then condemned. I think that I have here lighted on
the man who, under the name of Sallustianus Calpurnius, and through the
letter written to me by the orator Magnus, raised a not very(4) great
question. My answer on the general subject is contained in the short
treatise which I then wrote to him.(5) But at the present moment I must
make answer as to the sacrilege and perjury of my dream. I said that I
would thenceforward read no secular books: it was a promise for the future,
not the abolition of my memory of the past. How, you may ask me, can you
retain what you have been so long without reading? I must give my answer by
recurring to one of these old books:(1)

   'Tis much to be inured in tender youth.

   But by this mode of denial I criminate myself; for bringing Virgil as
my witness I am accused by my own defender. I suppose I must weave a long
web of words to prove what each man is conscious of. Which of us does not
remember his infancy? I shall make you laugh though you are a man of such
extreme gravity; and you will have at last to do as Crassus did, who,
Lucilius tells us, laughed but once in his life, if I recount the memories
of my childhood: how I ran about among the offices where the slaves worked;
how I spent the holidays in play; or bow I had to be dragged like a captive
from my grandmother's lap to the lessons of my enraged Orbilius.(2) You may
still more be astonished if I say that, even now that my head is gray and
bald, I often seem in my dreams to be standing, a curly youth, dressed in
my toga, to declaim a controversial thesis before the master of rhetoric;
and, when I wake, I congratulate myself on escaping the peril of making a
speech. Believe me, our infancy brings back to us many things most
accurately. If you had had a literary education, your mind would retain
what it was originally imbued with as a wine cask retains its scent. The
purple dye on the wool cannot be washed out with water. Even asses and
other brutes know the inns they have stopped at before, however long the
journey may have been. Are you astonished that I have not forgotten my
Latin books when you learnt Greek without a master? I learned the seven
forms of Syllogisms in the Elements of logic; I learned the meaning of an
Axiom, or as it might be called in Latin a Determination; I learned how
every sentence must have in it a verb and a noun; how to heap up the steps
of the Sorites,(3) how to detect the clever turns of the Pseudomenos(4) and
the frauds of the stock sophisms. I can swear that I never read any of
these things after I left school. I suppose that, to escape from having
what I learned made into a crime, I must, according to the fables of the
poets, go and drink of the river Lethe. I summon you, who accuse me for my
scanty knowledge, and who think yourself a literateur and a Rabbi, tell me
how was it that you dared to write some of the things you have written, and
to translate Gregory,(1) that most eloquent man, with a splendour of
eloquence like Iris own? Whence have you obtained that flow of words, that
lucidity of statement, that variety of translations,--you who in youth had
hardly more than a first taste of rhetoric? I must be very much mistaken if
you do not study Cicero in secret. I suspect that, being yourself so
cultivated a person, you forbid me trader penalties the reading of Cicero,
so that you may be left alone among our church writers to boast of your
flow of eloquence. I must say, however, that you, seem rather to follow the
philosophers, for your style is akin to that of the thorny sentences of
Cleanthes(2) and the contortions of Chrysippus,(3) not from any art, for of
that you say you are ignorant, but from the sympathy of genius. The Stoics
claim Logic as their own, a science which you despise as a piece of
fatuity; on this side, therefore, you are an Epicurean, and the principle
of your eloquence is, not style but matter. For, indeed, what does it
matter that no one else understands what you wish to say, when you write
for your own friends alone, not for all? I must confess that I myself do
not always understand what you write, and think that I am reading(4)
Heraclitus; however I do not complain, nor lament for my sluggishness; for
the trouble of reading what you write is not more than the trouble you must
have in writing it.

   31. I might well reply as I have done even if it were a question of a
promise made with full consciousness. But this is a new and shameless
thing; he throws in my teeth a mere dream. How am I to answer? I have no
time for thinking of anything outside my own sphere. I wish that I were not
prevented from reading even the Holy Scriptures by the throngs that beset
this place, and the gathering of Christians from all parts of the world.
Still, when a man makes a dream into a crime, I can quote to him the words
of the Prophets, who say that we are not to believe dreams; for even to
dream of adultery does not condemn us to hell, and to dream of the crown of
martyrdom does not raise us to heaven. Often I have seen myself in dreams
dead and placed in the grave: often I have flown over the earth and been
carried as if swimming through the air, over mountains and seas. My accuser
might, therefore, demand that I should cease to live, or that I should have
wings on my shoulders, because my mind has often been mocked in sleep by
vague fancies of this kind. How many people are rich while asleep and wake
to find themselves beggars! or are drinking water to cool their thirst, and
wake up with their throats parched and burning! You exact from me the
fulfilment of a promise given in a dream. I will meet you with a truer and
closer question: Have you done all that you promised in your baptism? Have
you or I fulfilled all that the profession of a monk demands? I beg you,
think whether you are not looking at the mote in my eye through the beam in
your own. I say this against my will; it is by sorrow that my reluctant
tongue is forced into words. As to you, it is not enough for you to make up
charges about my waking deeds, but you must accuse me for my dreams. You
have such an interest in my actions that you must discuss what I have said
or done in my sleep. I will not dwell on the way in which, in your zeal to
speak against me, you have besmirched your own profession, and have done
all you can by word and deed for the dishonouring of the whole body of
Christians. But I give you fair warning, and will repeat it again and
again. You are attacking a creature who has horns: and, if it were not that
I lay to heart the words of the Apostle(1) "The evil speakers(2)  shall not
inherit the kingdom of God," and(3)  "By hating one another you have been
consumed one of another," I would make you feel what a vast discord you
have stirred up after a slight and pretended reconciliation. What advantage
is it to you to heap up slanders against me both among friends and
strangers? Is it because I am not an Origenist, anti do not believe that I
sinned in heaven, that I am accused as a sinner upon earth? And was the
result of our renewal of friendship to be, that I was not to speak against
heretics for fear that my notice of them should be taken for an assault
upon you? So long as I did not refuse to be belauded by you, you followed
me as a master, you called me friend and brother, and acknowledged me as a
catholic in every respect. But when I asked to be spared your praises, and
judged myself unworthy to have such a great man for my trumpeter, you
immediately ran your pen through what you had written, and began to abuse
all that you had praised before, and to pour forth from the same mouth both
sweet and bitter words. I wish you could understand what self-repression I
am exerting in not suiting my words to the boiling heat of my breast; and
how I pray, like the Psalmist:(1) "Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth,
keep the door of my lips. Incline not my heart to the words of malice;"
and, as he says elsewhere:(2) "While the wicked stood before me I was dumb
and was humbled and kept silence even from good words;" and again:(3) "I
became as a man that heareth not and in whose mouth are no reproofs." But
for me the Lord the Avenger will reply, as he says through the Prophet:(4)
"Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord": and in another place:(5)
"Thou satest and spakest against thy brother, and hast slandered thy
mother's son. These things bast thou done, and I kept silence; thou
thoughtest indeed by that I should be such an one as thyself; but I will
reprove thee, and set them before thine eyes;" so that you may see yourself
brought in guilty of those things which you falsely lay to another's
charge.

   32. I am told, to take another point, that one of his followers,
Chrysogonus, finds fault with me for having said that in baptism all sins
are put away,(6) and, in the case of the man who was twice married, that he
had died and risen up a new man in Christ; and further that there were
several such persons who were Bishops in the churches. I will make him a
short answer. He and his friends have in their hands my letter, for which
they take me to task. Let him give an answer to it, let him overthrow its
reasoning by reasoning of his own, and prove my writings false by his
writings. Why should he knit his brow and draw in and wrinkle up his
nostrils, and weigh out his hollow words, and simulate among the common
crowd a sanctity which his conduct belies? Let me proclaim my principles
once more in his ears: That the old Adam dies completely in the layer of
baptism, and a new man uses then with Christ; that the man that is earthly
perishes and the man from heaven is raised up. I say this not because I
myself have a special interest in this question, through the mercy of
Christ; but that I made answer to my brethren when they asked me for my
opinion, not intending to prescribe for others what they may think right to
believe, nor to overturn their resolution by my opinion. For we who lie hid
in our cells do not covet the Bishop's office. We are not like some, who,
despising all humility, are eager to buy the episcopate with gold; nor do
we wish, with the minds of rebels, to suppress the Pontiff chosen by
God;(1) nor do we, by favouring heretics, show that we are heretics
ourselves. As for money, we neither have it nor desire to have it.(2) "
Having food and clothing, we are therewith content;" and meanwhile we
constantly chant the words describing the man who shall ascend to the hill
of the Lord:(3) "He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh
reward against the innocent; be who doeth these things shall not be moved
eternally." We may add that he who does the opposite to these will fall
eternally.

   Almost every sentence in this last chapter is  an insidious allusion to
Rufinus. His "wrinkled-up brow" and "turned-up nose," his weighing out his
words, his supposed wealth, are all alluded to in other places and
especially in the satirical description of him given after his death in
Jerome's letter (cxxv. c. 18) to Rusticus.


JEROME'S APOLOGY AGAINST RUFINUS


BOOK II

   1. Thus far I have made answer about my crimes, and indeed in defence
of my crimes, which my crafty encomiast formerly urged against me, and
which his disciples still constantly press. I have done so not as well as I
ought but as I was able, putting a check upon my complaints, for my object
has been not so much to accuse others as to defend myself. I will now come
to his Apology,(1) by which he strives to justify himself to Anastasius,
Bishop of the City of Rome, and, in order to defend himself, constructs a
mass of calumnies against me. His love for me is like that which a man who
has been carried away by the tempest and nearly drowned in deep water feels
for the strong swimmer at whose foot he clutches: he is determined that I
shall sink or swim with him.

   2. He professes in the first place to be replying to insinuations made
at Rome against his orthodoxy, he being a man most fully approved in
respect both of divine faith and of charity. He says that he would have
wished to come himself, were it not that he had lately returned, after
thirty years' absence, to his parents, and that it would have seemed harsh
and inhuman to leave them after having been so long in coming to them; and
also if he had not become somewhat less robust through his long and
toilsome journey, and too infirm to begin his labours again. As he had not
been able to come himself, he had sent his apology as a kind of literary
cudgel which the bishop might hold in his hand and drive away the dogs who
were raging against him. If he is a man approved for his divine faith and
charity by all, and especially by the Bishop to whom he writes; how is it
that at Rome he is assailed and reviled, and that the reports of the
attacks upon his reputation grow thicker. Further, what sort of humility is
this, that a man speaks of himself as approved for his divine faith and
charity? The Apostles prayed,(1)" Lord increase our faith," and received
for answer: "If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed;" and even to Peter
it is said:(1) "O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" Why
should I speak of charity, which is greater than either faith or hope, and
which Paul says he hopes for rather than assumes: without which even the
blood shed in martyrdom and the body given up to the flames has no reward
to crown it. Yet both of these our friend claims as his own: in such a way,
however, that there still remain creatures who bark against him, and who
will go on barking unless the illustrious Pontiff drives them away with his
stick. But how absurd is this plea which he puts forward, of having
returned to his parents after thirty years. Why, he has got neither father
nor mother! He left them alive when he was a young man, and, now that he is
old, he pines for them when they are dead. But perhaps, he means by
"parents," what is meant in the talk of the soldiers and the common people,
his kinsfolk and relations; well, he says he does not wish to be thought so
harsh and inhuman as to desert them; and therefore he leaves his home(2)
and goes to live at Aquileia. That most approved faith of his is in great
peril at Rome, and yet he lies on his back, being a bit tired after thirty
years, and cannot make that very easy journey m a carnage along that
Flaminian Way. He puts forward his lassitude after his long journey, as if
he had done nothing but move about for thirty years, or as if, after
resting at Aquileia for two years, he was still worn out with the labour of
his past travels.

   3. I will touch upon the other points, and set down the actual words of
his letter:

   " Although my faith was proved, at the time of the persecution by the
heretics, when I was living in the holy church of Alexandria, by
imprisonments and exiles, to which I was subjected because of the faith."

   I only wonder that he did not add(3) "The prisoner of Jesus Christ," or
"I was delivered from the jaw of the lion," or "I fought with beasts at
Alexandria," or "I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness." What exiles,
what imprisonments are these which he describes? I blush for this open
falsehood. As if imprisonment and exile would be inflicted without judicial
sentences! I should like to have a list of these imprisonments and of the
various provinces to which he tells us that he was forced into exile. Next
there appear to have been numerous imprisonments and an infinite number of
exiles; so that he might at least name one of them all. Let us have the
acts of his confessorship produced, for hitherto we have been in ignorance
of them; and so let us have the satisfaction of reciting his deeds with
those of the other martyrs of Alexandria, and that he may be able to meet
the people who bark against him with the words:(1) "From henceforth let no
man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of our Lord Jesus Christ."

 4. He goes on:

   "Still, since there may be some persons, who may wish to prove my
faith, or to hear and learn what it is. I will declare that I thus think of
the Trinity;"

and so on. At first you said that you entrusted your faith to the Bishop as
a stick with which he might fortify himself on your behalf against those
barking dogs. Now you speak a little less confidently, "There may be some
persons who wish to prove my faith." You begin to hesitate when the barking
which reach your ears are so numerous. I will not stop to discuss the forms
of diction which you use, for these you look down upon and condemn: I will
answer according to the meaning alone. You are asked about one thing, and
you give account for yourself upon another. As to the doctrines of Arius,
you contended against them at Alexandria a long time ago, by imprisonment
and exile, not with words but with blood. But the question now relates to
the heresy of Origen, and the feeling aroused against you on the subject. I
should be sorry that you should trouble yourself to cure wounds which are
already healed. You confess a Trinity in one Godhead. The whole world now
confesses this, and I think that even the devils confess that the Son of
God was born of the Virgin Mary, and took upon him the flesh and the soul
belonging to human nature. But I must beg you not to think me a contentious
man if I examine you a little more strictly. You say that the Son of God
took the flesh and soul belonging  to human nature. Well then, I would ask
you not to be vexed with me but to answer this question. That soul which
Jesus took upon him, did it exist before it was born of Mary? Was it
created together with the body in that original Virgin nature which was
begotten by the Holy Spirit? or, when the body was already formed within
the womb, was it made all at once, and sent down from heaven? I wish to
know which one of these you choose as your opinion. If it existed before it
was born from Mary, then it was not yet the soul of Jesus; and it was
employed in some way, and, for a reward of its virtues, it was made his
soul. If it arose by traduction,(1) then human souls, which we believe to
be eternal, are subject to the same condition as those of the brutes, which
perish with the body. But if it is created and sent into the body after the
body has been formed, tell us so simply, and free us from anxiety.

   5. None of these answers will you give us. You turn to other things,
and by your tricks and shew of words prevent us from paying close attention
to the question. What! you will say, was not the question about the
resurrection of the flesh and the punishment of the devil? True; and
therefore I ask for a brief and sincere answer. I raise no question as to
your declaration that it is this very flesh in which we live which rises
again, without the loss of a single member, and without any part of the
body being cut off (for these are your own words). Butt I want to know
whether you hold, what Origen denies, that the bodies rise with the same
sex with which they died; and that Mary will still be Mary and John be
John; or whether the sexes will be so mixed and confused that there will be
neither man nor woman, but something which is both or neither; and also
whether you hold that the bodies remain uncorrupt and immortal, and, as you
acutely suggest after the Apostle, spiritual bodies forever; and not only
the bodies, but the actual flesh, with blood infused into it, and passing
by channels through the veins and bones,--such flesh as Thomas touched; or
that little by little they are dissolved into nothing, and reduced into the
four elements of which they were compounded. This you ought either to
confess or deny, and not to say what Origen also says, but insincerely, as
if he were playing upon the weakness of fools and children, "without the
loss of a single member or the cutting off of any part of the body." Do you
suppose that what we feared was that we might rise without noses and ears,
that we should find that our genital organs would be cut off or maimed and
that a city of eunuchs was built up in the new Jerusalem?

   6. Of the devil he thus frames his opinion:

   "We affirm also a judgment to come, in which judgment every man is to
receive the due meed of his bodily life according to that which be has
done, whether good or evil. And, if in the case of men the reward is
according to their works how much more will it be so in the case of the
devil who is the universal cause of sin. Of the devil himself our belief is
that which is written in the Gospel, namely that both he and all his angels
will receive as their portion the eternal fire, and  with him those who do
his works, that is, who become the accusers of their brethren. If then any
one denies that the devil is to be subjected to  eternal fires, may he have
his part with him in the eternal fire, so that he may know by experience
the fact which he now denies."

   I will repeat the words one by one. "We affirm also a judgment to come,
in which judgment &c." I had determined to say nothing about verbal faults.
But, since his disciples admire the eloquence of their master, I will make
one or two strictures upon it. He had already said "a future judgment;"
but, being a cautious man, he was afraid of saving simply "in which," and
therefore wrote "in which judgment;" for fear that, if he had not said
"judgment" a second time, we, forgetting what had gone before, might have
supplied the word "ass." That which he brings in afterwards "those who
become the accusers of their brethren will with him have their portion in
the eternal fire," is in a style of equal beauty. Who ever heard of
'possessing' the flames'? It would be like 'enjoying tortures.' I suppose
that, being now a Greek, he had tried to translate himself, and that for
the word klhronomh'sousin.(2) which can be rendered in Latin by the single
word Haereditabunt, he said Haereditate potientur(3) supposing it to be
something more elaborate and ornate. With such trifles and such
improprieties of speech his whole discourse is teeming. But to return to
the meaning of his words.

   7. To proceed:

   "This is a great spear with which the devil is pierced, he, ' who is
the universal cause of sin.' if he is to render account of his works, like
a man, and 'with his angels possess the inheritance of eternal fires.'
This, no doubt, was what was lacking to him, that, having brought mankind
into torment, he should himself 'possess the eternal fires' which he bad
all the while been longing for."

   You seem to me here to speak a little too hardly of the devil, and to
assail the accuser of all with false accusations. You say 'he is the
universal cause of sin ;' and, while you make him the author of all crimes,
you tree men from fault, and take away the freedom of the will. Our Lord
says that(1) 'from our heart come forth evil thoughts, murders adulteries,
fornications, thefts, false witnesses, railings,' and of Judas we read in
the Gospel;(2) "After the sop Satan entered into him," that is, because he
had before the sop sinned voluntarily, and had not been brought to
repentance either by humbling himself or by the forbearance of the Saviour.
So also the Apostle says;(3) "Such men I delivered to Satan, that they
might be taught not to blaspheme." He delivered to Satan as to a torturer,
with a view to their punishment those who, before they had been delivered
to him learned to blaspheme by their own will. David also draws the
distinction in a few words between the faults due to his own will and the
incentives of vice when he says(4) "Cleanse thou me from my secret faults,
and keep back thy servant from alien sins." We read also in Ecclesiastes(5)
"If the spirit of a ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place;" from
which we may clearly see that we commit sin if we give opportunity to the
power which rises up, and if we fail to hurl down headlong the enemy who is
scaling our walls. As to your threatening your brothers, that is, those who
accuse you, with eternal fire in company with the devil, it seems to me
that you do not so much drag your brethren down as raise the devil up,
since he, according to you, is to be punished only with the same fires as
Christian men. But you well know, I think, what eternal fires mean
according to the ideas of Origen, namely, the sinners' conscience, and the
remorse which galls their hearts within. These ideas he thinks are intended
in the words of Isaiah:(6) "Their worm shall not die neither shall their
fire be quenched." And in the words addressed to Babylon:(7) "Thou hast
coals of fire, thou shall sit upon them, these shall be thy help." So also
in the Psalm it  is said to the penitent;(8) "What shall be given to thee,
or what shall be done more for thee against thee false tongue? Sharp arrows
of the mighty, with desolating coals;" which means (according to him) that
the arrows of God's precepts (concerning which the Prophet says in another
place,(9) "I lived in misery while a thorn pierces me") should wound and
strike through the crafty tongue, and make an end of sins in it. He also
interprets the place where the Lord testifies saying:(1) "I came to send
fire on the earth, and how I wish that it may burn" as meaning "I wish that
all may repent, and burn out through the  Holy spirit their vices and their
sins; for I am he of whom it is written,(2) "Our God is a consuming fire;"
it is no great thing then to say this of the devil, since it is prepared
also for men." You ought rather to have said, if you wished to avoid the
suspicion of believing in the salvation of the devil;(3) "Thou hast become
perdition and shall not be for ever;" and as the Lord speaks to Job
concerning the devil(4) "Behold his hone shall fail him and in the sight of
all shall he be cast down. I will not arouse him as one that is cruel, for
who can resist my countenance? Who has first given to me that I may return
it to him? for all things beneath the heaven are mine. I will not spare him
and his words that are powerful and fashioned to turn away wrath." Hence,
these things may pass as the work of a plain man. Their bearing is evident
enough to those who understand these matters; but to the unlearned they may
wear the appearance of innocence.

   8. But what follows about the condition of souls can by no means be
excused. He says:

   "I am next informed that some stir has been made on the question of the
nature of the soul. Whether complaints on a matter of this kind ought to be
entertained instead of being put aside, you mast yourself decide. If,
however, you desire to know my opinion upon this subject, I will state it
frankly. I have read a great many writers on this question, and I find that
they express divers opinions. Some of these whom I have read hold that the
soul is infused together with the material body through the channel of the
human seed, and of this they give such proofs as they can. I think that
this was the opinion of Tertullian or Lactantius among the Latins, perhaps
also of a few others. Others assert that God is every day making new souls
and infusing them into the bodies which have been framed in the womb; while
others again believe that the souls were all made long ago, when God made
all things of nothing, and that all that he now does is to send out each
soul to be born in its body as it seems good to him. This is the opinion of
Origen, and of some others among the Greeks. For myself, I declare in the
presence of God that, after reading each of these opinions, I am unable to
hold any of them as certain and absolute: the determination of the truth in
this question I leave to God and to any to whom it shall please him to
reveal it. My profession on this point is, therefore, first, that these
several opinions are those which I have found in books, but, secondly, that
I as yet remain in ignorance on the subject, except so far as this. that
the Church delivers it as an article of faith that God is the creator of
souls as well as of bodies."

   9. Before I enter upon the subject matter of this passage, I must stand
in admiration of words worthy of Theophrastus:

   "I am informed, he says, that some stir has been made on the question
of the nature of the soul. Whether complaints on a matter of this kind
ought to be entertained instead of being put aside, you must yourself
decide."

   If these questions as to the origin of the soul have been stirred at
Rome, what is the meaning of this complaint and murmuring on the question
whether they ought to be entertained or not, a question which belongs
entirely to the discretion of bishops? But perhaps he thinks that question
and complaint mean the same thing, because he finds this form of speech in
the Commentaries of Caper. Then be writes: "Some of those whom I have read
hold that the soul is infused together with the material body through the
channel of the human seed; and of these they give such proofs as they can."
What license have we here in the forms of speech! What mixing of the moods
and tenses!(1) "I have read some sayings -- they confirmed them with what
assertions they could." And in what follows: "Others assert that God is
every day making new souls and infusing them into the bodies which have
been framed in the womb; while others again believe that the souls were all
made long ago when God made all things of nothing, and that all that he now
does is to send out each soul to be born in its body as seems good to him."
Here also we have a most beautiful arrangement. Some, he says, assert this
and that; some declare that the souls were made long ago, that is, when God
made all things of nothing, and that He now sends them forth to be born in
their own body as it pleases him. He speaks so distastefully and so
confusedly that I have more trouble in correcting his mistakes than he in
writing them. At the end he says: "I, however, though I have read these
things;" and, while the sentence still hangs unfinished, he adds, as if he
had brought forward something flesh: "I, however, do not deny that I have
both read each of these things, and as yet confess that I am ignorant."

   10. Unhappy souls! stricken through with all these barbarisms as with
so many lances! I doubt whether they had so much trouble when, according to
the erroneous theory of Origen, they tell from heaven to earth, and were
clothed in these gross bodies, as they have now in being knocked about on
all sides by these strange words and sentences: not to mention that word of
ill omen which says that they are infused through the channel of the human
seed. I know that it is not usual in Christian writings to criticise mere
faults of style; but I thought it well to shew by a few examples how rash
it is to teach what you are ignorant of, to write what you do not know: so
that, when we come to the subject-matter, we may be prepared to find the
same amount of wisdom. He sends a letter, which he calls a very strong
stick, as a weapon for the Bishop of Rome; and on the very subject about
which the dogs are barking at him he professes entire ignorance of the
question. If he is ignorant on the subject for which ill-reports are
current against him, what need was there for him to send an Apology, which
contains no defence of himself, but only a confession of his ignorance?
This course is calculated to sow a crop of suspicious, not to calm them. He
gives us three opinions about the origin of souls; and his conclusion at
the end is: "I do not deny that I have read each of them, and I confess
that I still am ignorant." You would suppose him to be Arcesilaus(1) or
Carneades(2) who declare that there is no certainty; though be surpasses
even them in his cautiousness; for they were driven by the intolerable ill-
will which they aroused among philosophers for taking all truth out of
human life, to invent the doctrines of probability, so that by making their
probable assertions they might temper their agnosticism; but he merely says
that he is uncertain, and does not know which of these opinions is true. If
this was all the answer he had to make, what could have induced him to
invoke so great a Pontiff as the witness of his lack of theological
culture. I presume this is the lassitude about which he tells us that he is
exhausted with his thirty-years' journey and cannot come to Rome. There are
a great many things of which we are all ignorant; but we do not ask for
witnesses of our ignorance. As to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as to the
nativity of our Lord and Saviour, about which Isaiah cries,(3) "Who shall
declare his generation?" he speaks boldly, and a mystery of which all past
ages knew nothing he claims as quite within his knowledge: this alone he
does not know, the ignorance of which causes men to stumble. As to how a
virgin became the mother of God, he has full knowledge; as to how he
himself was born he knows nothing. He confesses that God is the maker of
souls and bodies. whether souls existed before bodies or whether they came
into being with the germs of bodies, or are sent into them when they are
already formed in the womb. In any case we recognize God as their author.
The question at issue is not whether the souls were made by God or by
another, but which of the three opinions which he states is true. Of this
he professes ignorance. Take care! You may find people saying that the
reason for your confession of your ignorance of the three is that you do
not wish to be compelled to condemn one. You spare Tertullian and
Lactantius so as not to condemn Origen with them. As far as I remember
(though I may he mistaken) I am not aware of having read that Lactantius
spoke of the soul as planted at the same time as the body.(1) But, as you
say that you have read it, please to tell me in what book it is to be
found, so that you may not be thought to have calumniated him in his death
as you have me in my slumber. But even here you walk with a cautious and
hesitating step. You say: "I think that, among the Latins, Tertullian or
Lactantius held this opinion, perhaps also some others. You not only are in
doubt about the origin of souls, but you have only 'thoughts' as to the
opinion which each writer holds: yet the matter is of some importance. On
the question of the soul, however, you openly proclaim your ignorance, and
confess your untaught condition: as to the authors, your knowledge amounts
only to 'thinking,' hardly to 'presuming.' But as to Origen alone you are
quite clear. "This is Origen's opinion," you say. But, let me ask you: Is
the opinion sound or not? Your reply is, "I do not know." Then why do you
send me messengers and letter-carriers, who are constantly coming, merely
to teach me that you are ignorant? To prevent the possibility of my
doubting whether your incapacity is as great as you say, and thinking it
possible that you are cunningly concealing all you know, you take an oath
in the presence of God that up to the present moment yon hold nothing for
certain and definite on this subject, and that you leave it to God to know
what is true, and to any one to whom it may please Him to reveal it. What!
Through all these ages does it seem to you that there has been no one
worthy of having this revealed to him? Neither patriarch, nor prophet, nor
apostle, nor martyr? Were not these mysteries made clear even to yourself
when you dwelt amidst princes and exiles? The Lord says in the Gospel:(1)
"Father, I have revealed thy name to men." Did he who revealed the Father
keep silence on the origin of souls? And are you astonished if your
brethren are scandalized when you swear that you know nothing of a thing
which the churches of Christ profess I to know?(2)

   11. After the exposition of his faith, or rather his lack of knowledge,
he passes on to another matter; and tries to make excuses for having turned
the books Peri` Archw^n into Latin. I will put down his words literally:

   "I am told that objections have been raised against me because,
forsooth, at the request of some of my brethren, I translated certain works
Of Origen from Greek into Latin. I suppose that every one sees that it is
only through ill-will that this is made a matter of blame. For, if there is
any offensive statement in the author, why is this to be twisted into a
fault of the translator? I was asked to exhibit in Latin what stands
written in the Greek text; and I did nothing more than fit Latin words to
Greek ideas. If, therefore, there is anything to praise in these ideas, the
praise does not belong to me: and similarly as to anything to which blame
may attach."

   "I hear," he says, "that thence dispute has arisen."(3) How clever this
is, to speak of it as a dispute, when it is really an accusation against
him. "That I have, at the request of my brethren, translated certain things
of Origen's into Latin." Yes, but what are these "certain things"? Have
they no name? Are you silent? Then the bills of charge brought by the
accusers will speak for you. "I suppose," he says, "that every one
understands that it is only through envy that these things are made matters
of blame." What envy? Are people envious of your eloquence? Or have you
done what no other man has ever been able to do? Here am I, who have
translated many works of Origen's; yet, except you, no one shews envy
towards me or calumniates me for it. "If there is any offensive statement
in the author, why is it to be twisted into a fault of the translator? I
was asked to exhibit in Latin what stands written in the Greek text; and I
did nothing more than fit Latin words to Greek ideas. If, therefore, there
is anything to praise in these ideas, the praise does not belong to me, and
similarly as to anything to which blame may attach." Can you be astonished
that men think ill of you when you say of open blasphemies nothing more
than, "If there are any offensive statements in the author"? What is said
in those books is offensive to all men; and you stand alone in your doubt
and ill your complaint that this is "twisted into a fault of the
translator," when you have praised it in your Preface. 'You were asked to
turn it into Latin as it stood in the Greek text.' I wish you had done what
you pretend you were asked. You would not then be the object of any ill
will. If you had kept faith as a translator, it would not have been
necessary for me to counteract your false translation by my true one. You
know in your own conscience what you added, what you subtracted, and what
you altered on one side or the other at your discretion; and after this you
have the audacity to tell us that what is good or evil is not to be
attributed to you but to the author. You shew your sense of the ill will
aroused against you by again toning down your words: and as if you were
walking with your steps in the air or on the tops of the ears of corn, you
say, "Whether there is praise or blame in these opinions." You dare not
defend him, but you do not choose to condemn him. Choose which of the two
you please; the option is yours; if this which you have translated is good,
praise it, if bad, condemn it. But he makes excuses, and weaves another
artifice, He says:

   "I admit that I put something of my own into the work: as I stated in
my Preface, I used my own discretion in cutting out not a few passages; but
only those as to which I had come to suspect that the thing had not been so
stated by Origen himself, and the statement appeared to me in these cases
to have been inserted by others, because in other places I had found the
author state the same matter in a catholic sense."(1)

 What wonderful eloquence! Varied, too, with flowers of the Attic style.
"Moreover also!"(2) and "Things which came to me into suspicion!" I marvel
that lie should have dared to send such literary portents to Rome. One
would think that the man's tongue was in fetters, and bound with cords that
cannot be disentangled, so that it could hardly break forth into human
speech. However, I will return to the matter in hand.

   11(a). I wish to know who gave you permission to cut out a number of
passages from the work you were translating? You were asked to turn a Greek
book into Latin, not to correct it; to draw out another man's words, not to
write a book of your own. You confess, by the fact of pruning away so much,
that you did not do what you were asked. And I wish that what you curtailed
had all been the bad parts, and that you had not put in many things of your
own which go to support what is bad. I will take an example, from which men
may judge of the rest. In the first book of the Peri` Archw^n where Origen
had uttered that impious blasphemy, that the Son does not see the Father,
you supply the reasons for this, as if in the name of the writer, and
translate the note of Didymus, in which he makes a fruitless effort to
defend another man's error, trying to prove that Origen spoke rightly; but
we, poor simple men, like the tame creatures spoken of by Ennius, can
understand neither his wisdom nor that of his translator. Your Preface,
which you allege in explanation, in which you flatter and praise me so
highly shows you to be guilty of the most serious faults of translation.
You say that you have cut out many things from the Greek, but you noticing
of what you have put in. Were the parts cut out good or bad? Bad, I
suppose. Was what you kept good or bad? Good, presume; for you could not
translate the bad. Then I suppose you cut off what was bad and left what
was good? Of course. But what you have translated can be shewn to be almost
wholly bad. Whatever therefore in your translation I can shew to be must be
laid to your account, since you translated it as being good. It is a
strange thing if you are to act like an unjust censor, who is himself
guilty of the crime, and are allowed at your will to expel some from the
Senate and keep others in it. But you say: "It was impossible to change
everything only thought I might cut away what had been added by the
heretics." Very good. Then if you cut away all that you thought had been
added by the heretics, all that you left belongs to the work which you were
translating. Answer me then, are these good or bad? You could not translate
what was had, since once for all you had cut away what had been added by
the heretics, that is, unless you thought it your duty to cut away the bad
parts due to the heretics, while translating the errors of Origen himself
unaltered into Latin. Tell me then, why you turned Origen's heresies into
Latin. Was it to expose the author of the evil, or to praise him? If your
object is to expose him, why do you praise him in the Preface? If you
praise him you are convicted of being a heretic. The only remaining
hypothesis is that you published these things as being good. But if they
are proved to be bad, then author and translator are involved in the same
crime, and the Psalmist's word is fulfilled:(1) "When thou sawest a thief,
thou consentedst unto him and hast been partaker with the adulterers." It
is needless to make a plain matter doubtful by arguing about it. As to what
follows, let him answer whence this suspicion arose in his mind of these
additions by heretics. "It was," he says, "because I found the same things
treated by this author in other places in a catholic sense."

   12. We must consider the fact, which comes first, and so in order reach
the inference, which comes after. Now I find among many bad things written
by Origen the following most distinctly heretical: that the Son of God is a
creature, that the Holy Spirit is a servant: that there are innumerable
worlds, succeeding one another in eternal ages: that angels have been
turned into human souls; that the soul of the Saviour existed before it was
born of Mary, and that it is this soul which "being in the form of God
thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied itself and took
the form of a servant;"(2) that the resurrection of our bodies will be such
that we shall not have the same members, since, when the functions of the
members cease they will become superfluous: and that our bodies themselves
will grow aerial and spirit-like, and gradually vanish and disperse into
thin air and into nothing: that in the restitution of all things, when the
fulness of forgiveness will have been reached, Cherubim and Seraphim,
Thrones, Principalities, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Archangels and Angels,
the devil, the demons and the souls of men whether Christians Jews or
Heathen, will be of one condition and degree; and when they have come to
their trite form and weight, and the new army of the whole race returning
from the exile of the world presents a mass of rational creatures with all
their dregs left behind, then will begin a new world from a new origin, and
other bodies in which the souls who fall from heaven will be clothed; so
that we may have to fear that we who are now men may afterwards be born
women, and one who is now a virgin may chance then to be a prostitute.
These things I point out as heresies in the books of Origen. It is for you
to point out in which of his books you have found them contradicted.

   13. Do not tell me that "you have found the same things treated by the
same author in other places in a catholic sense," and thus send me to
search through the six thousand books of Origen which you charge the most
reverend Bishop Epiphanius with having read; but mention the passages with
exactness: nor will this suffice; you must produce the sentences word for
word. Origen is no fool, as I well know; he cannot contradict himself. The
net result arising from all this calculation is, then, that what you cut
out was not due to the heretics, but to Origen himself, and that you
translated the bad things he had written because you considered them good;
and that both the good and the bad things in the book are to be set to your
account, since you approved his writings in the Prologue.

   14. The next passage in this apology is as follows:

   "I am neither a champion nor a defender of Origen, nor am I the first
who has translated his works. Others before me have done the same thing:
and I did it, the last of many, at the request of my brethren. If an order
is to be given that such translations are not to be made, such an order
holds good for the future, not the past: but if those are to be blamed who
have made these translations before any such order was given, the blame
must begin with those who took the first step."

   Here at last he has vomited forth what he wanted to say, and all his
inflamed mind has broken oat into this malicious accusation against me.
When he translates the Peri` Archw^n he declares that he is following me.
When he is accused for having done it, he gives me as his example: whether
he is in danger or out of danger, he cannot live without me. Let me tell
him, therefore, what he professes not to know. No one reproaches you
because you translated Origen, otherwise Hilary and Ambrose would be
condemned: but because you translated a heretical work, and tried to gain
support for it by praising me in the Preface. I myself, whom you criminate,
translated seventy homilies of Origen, and parts of his Tomes, in order
that by translating his best works I might withdraw the worst from notice:
and I also have openly translated the Peri` Archw^n to prove the falsity of
your translation, so as to show the reader what to avoid. If you wish to
translate Origen into Latin, you have at hand many homilies and Tomes of
his, in which some topic of morality is handled or some obscure passage of
Scripture is opened. Translate these give these to those who ask them of
you. Why should your first labour begin with what is infamous? And why,
when you were about to translate a heretical work, did you preface and
support it by the supposed book of a martyr, and force upon the ears of
Romans a book the translation of which threw the world into panic? At all
events, if you translate such a work with the view of exhibiting the author
as a heretic, change nothing from the Greek text, and make this clear in
the Preface. It is this which the Pope Anastasius most wisely embodies in
the letter which he has addressed to the Bishop John against you; he frees
me who have done this froth all blame, but condemns you who would not do
it. You will perhaps deny the existence of this letter; I have therefore
subjoined a copy of it; so that, if you will not listen to your brother
when he advises, you may listen to the Bishop when he condemns.

   15. You say that you are not the defender or the champion of Origen;
but I will at once confront you with your own book of which you spoke in
that notorious preface to your renowned work in these terms:

   "The cause of this diversity I have set forth more fully for you in the
Apology which Pamphilus wrote among his treatises, adding a very short
document of my own, in which I have shewn by what appear to me evident
proofs, that his works have been depraved in many places by heretics and
ill-disposed persons, and especially those which I am now translating, the
Peri` Archw^n."

   The defence made by Eusebius, or if you will have it so, by Pamphilus,
was not sufficient for you, but you must add something from your superior
wisdom and learning to supply what you thought insufficient in what they
had said. It would be a long business if I were to insert the whole of your
book into the present treatise, and, after setting out each paragraph, to
reply to each in turn, and shew what vices there are in the style, what
falsehoods in the assertions, what inconsistency in the actual tissue of
the language. And therefore, to avoid a redundant discussion which is
distasteful to me, I will compress the verbal matter into a narrow compass,
and reply to the meaning alone. As soon as he leaves the harbour he runs
his ship upon a rock. He recalls the words of the Apology of the Martyr
Pamphilus (which however, I have proved to be the work of Eusebius the
Chief of the Arians) of which he had said, "I translated it into the Latin
tongue as best I was able and as the matter demanded;" he then adds: "It is
this as to which I wish to give you a charge, Macarius, man of desires,(1)
that you may feel sure that this rule of faith which I have above set forth
out of his books, is such as ought to be embraced and held fast: it is
clearly shewn that there is a catholic meaning in them all." Although he
took away many things from the book of Eusebius, and tried to alter in a
good sense the expressions about the Son and the Holy Spirit, still there
are found in it many causes of offence, and even open blasphemies, which
our friend cannot refuse to accept since he pronounces them to be catholic.
Eusebius (or, if you please, Pamphilus) says in that book that the Son is
the Servant of the Father, the Holy Spirit is not of the same substance
with the Father and the Son; that the souls of men have fallen from heaven;
and, inasmuch as we have been changed from the state of Angels, that in the
restitution of all things angels and devils and men will all be equal; and
many other things so impious and atrocious that it would be a crime even to
repeat them. The champion of Origen and translator of Pamphilus is in a
strange position. If there is so much blasphemy in these parts which he has
corrected, what sacrilegious things must there be in the parts which, as he
pretends, have been falsified by heretics! What makes him hold this
opinion, as he says, is that a man who is neither a feel nor a madman could
not have said things mutually repugnant; and, that we may not suppose that
he had written different things at different times, and that he put forth
contrary views according to the time of writing, he has added:

   "What are we to say when sometimes in the same place, and, so to speak,
almost in the following paragraph, a sentence with an opposite meaning is
found inserted? Can we believe that, in the same work and in the same book,
and sometimes, as I have said in the sentence immediately following, he can
have forgotten his own words? For example, could he who had before said, we
can find no passage throughout the Scriptures in which the Holy Spirit is
said to be created or made, immediately add that the Holy Spirit was made
among the rest of the creatures? or again, could he who defined the Father
and the Son to be of one substance, that namely which is called in Greek
Homoousion, say in the following portions that he was of another substance,
and that he was created, when but a little before he had declared him to be
born from the nature of God the Father?"

   16. These are his own words, he cannot deny them. Now I do not want to
be put off with such expressions as "since he said above" but I want to
have the name of the book in which he first spoke rightly and then wrongly:
in which he first says that the Holy Spirit and the Son are of the
substance of God, and in what immediately follows declares that they are
creatures. Do you not know that I possess the whole of Origen's works and
have read a vast number of them?

   "Your trappings to the mob! I know you well; What lies within and on
the skin I see."(1)

   Eusebius who was a very learned man, (observe I say learned not
catholic: you must not, according to your wont make this a ground for
calumniating me) takes up six volumes with nothing else but the attempt to
shew that Origen is of his way of believing, that is of the Arian perfidy.
He brings out many test-passages, and effectually proves his point. In what
dream m an Alexandrian prison was the revelation given to you on the
strength of which you make out these passages to be falsified which he
accepts as true? But possibly he being an Arian, took in these additions of
the heretics to support his own error, so that he should not be thought to
be the only one who had held false opinions contrary to the Church. What
answer will you make, then, as to Didymus, who certainly is catholic as
regards the Trinity? You know that I translated his book on the Holy Spirit
into Latin. He surely could not have assented to the passages in Origen's
works which were added by heretics; yet he wrote some short commentaries on
the Peri` Archw^n which you have translated; in these he never denies that
what is there written was written by Origen, but only tries to persuade us
simple people that we do not understand his meaning and how these passages
ought to be taken in a good sense. So much on the Son and the Holy Spirit
alone. But in reference to the rest of Origen's doctrines, both Eusebius
and Didymus adhere to his views, and defend, as said in a catholic and
Christian sense, what all the churches reprobate.

   17. But let us consider what are the arguments by which he tries to
prove that Origen's writings have been corrupted by the heretics.

   "Clement," he says, "who was the disciple of the Apostles, and who
succeeded the apostles both in the episcopate and in martyrdom, wrote the
books which go by the name of Anagnorismus; that is, Recognitions. In
these, though, speaking generally, the doctrine which is set forth in the
name of the Apostle Peter is genuinely apostolical, yet in certain passages
the doctrine of Eunomius is brought in such a way as that you would suppose
Eunomius himself to be conducting the argument and asserting his view that
the Son was created out of nothing."

   And, after a passage too long to reproduce, he adds:

   "What then are we to think of these facts? Must we believe that an
Apostolic man wrote heresy? or is it not more likely that men of perverse
mind, wishing to gain support for their own doctrines, and win easier
credit for them, introduced under the names of holy men views which they
cannot be believed either to have held or to have written down?"

   He tells us that Clement the presbyter of Alexandria also, who was a
catholic man, writes at times in his works that the Son of God is created;
and that Dionysius Bishop of Alexandria, a most learned man, in the four
books in which he controverted the doctrines of Sabellius, lapses into the
dogma of Arius. What he aims at by quoting these instances is not to shew
that Churchmen and catholics have erred, but that their writings have been
corrupted by heretics, and he closes the discussion with these words:

   "And when we find in Origen a certain diversity of doctrine, just as we
have found it in those of whom we have spoken above, will it not be
sufficient for us to believe the same in his case which we believe or
understand in the case of the catholic men whom we have passed in review?
Will not the same defence hold good when the case is the same?"

   If, I reply, we admit that everything in a book which is offensive is
corruptly inserted by others, nothing will remain belonging to the author
under whose name the book passes, but everything can be assigned to those
by whom it is supposed to have been corrupted. But then it will not belong
to them either, since we do not know who they were: and the result will be
that every book belongs to everybody and nothing to any one in particular.
In this confusion which this method of defence introduces, it will be
impossible to convict Marcion of error, or Manichus or Arius or Eunomius;
because, as soon as we point out a statement of their unbelief, their
disciples will answer that was not what the master wrote, but was corruptly
inserted by his opponents. According to this principle, this very book of
yours will not be yours nor mine. And as to this very book in which I am
making reply to your accusations, whatever you find fault with in it will
be held not be written by me but by you who now find fault with it. And
further, while you assign everything to the heretics, there will be nothing
left which you can assign to churchmen as their own.

   But you may ask, How is it then that in their books some false views
occur? Well, if I answer that I do not know the parties whence these false
views came, I must not be thought to have said that they are heretics. It
is possible that they may have fallen into error unawares, or that the
words bore a different meaning, or that they may have been gradually
corrupted by unskilful copyists It must be admitted that, before Arius
arose in Alexandria as a demon of the south, things were said incautiously
which cannot be defended against a malevolent criticism. But when glaring
faults are exposed in Origen, you do not defend him but accuse others; you
do not deny the faults, but summon up a host of criminals. If you were
asked to name those who have been the companions of Origen in his heresies,
it would be right enough to call in these others. But what you are now
asked to tell us is whether those statements in the books of Origen are
good or evil; and you say nothing, but bring in irrelevant matters, such
as: This is what Clement says; this is an error of which Dionysius is found
guilty; these are the words in which the bishop Athanasius defends the
error of Dionysius; in a similar way the writings of the Apostle have been
tampered with: and then, while the charge of heresy is fastened upon you,
you say nothing in your own defence, but make confessions about me. I make
no accusations, and am content with answering for myself. I am not what you
try to prove me: whether you are what you are accused of being, is for you
to consider. The fact that I am acquitted of blame does not prove me
innocent nor the fact that you are accused prove you a criminal.

   18. After this preface as to the falsification by heretics of the
apostles, of both the Clements, and of Dionysius, he at last comes to
Origen; and these are his words:

   "I have shewn from his own words and writings how he himself complains
of this and deplores it: He explains clearly in the letter which he wrote
to some of his intimate friends at Alexandria what he suffered while living
here in the flesh and in the full enjoyment of his senses, by the
corruption of his books and treatises, or by spurious editions of them."

   He subjoins a copy of this letter; and he who implores to the heretics
the falsification of Origen's writings himself begins by falsifying them,
for he does not translate the letter as be finds it in the Greek, and does
not convey to the Latins what Origen states in his letter. The object of
the whole letter is to assail Demetrius the Pontiff of Alexandria, and to
inveigh against the bishops throughout the world, and to tell them that
their excommunication of him is invalid; he says further that he has no
intention of retorting their evil speaking; indeed he is so much afraid of
evil speaking that he does not dare to speak evil even of the devil;
insomuch that he gave occasion to Candidus an adherent of the errors of
Valentinian to represent him falsely as saying that the devil is of such a
nature as could be saved. But our friend takes no notice of the real
purport of the letter, and makes up for Origen an argument which he does
not use.  I have therefore translated a part of the letter, beginning a
little way below what has been already spoken of, and have appended it to
the part which has been translated by him in a curtailed and disingenuous
manner, so that the reader may perceive the object with which be suppressed
the earlier part. He is contending, then, against the Bishops of the church
generally, because they had judged him unworthy of its communion; and he
continues as follows:

   "Why need I speak of the language in which the prophets constantly
threaten and reprove the pastors, elders, the priests and the princes?
These things you can of yourselves without my aid draw out from the Holy
Scriptures, and you may clearly see that it may well be the present time of
which it is said(1)' Trust not in your friends, and do not hope in
princes,' and that the prophecy is now gaining its fulfilment,(2) The
leaders of my people have not known me; my sons are fools and not wise:
they are wise to do evil, but know not to do good.' We ought to pity them,
not to hate them, to pray for them, not to curse them. For we have been
created for blessing, not for cursing. Therefore even Michael,(3) when he
disputed against the devil concerning the body of Moses, did not dare to
bring a railing accusation even for so great an evil, but said; 'The Lord
rebuke thee.' And we read something similar in Zachariah,(4) 'The Lord
rebuke thee, O Satan; the Lord which hath chosen  Jerusalem rebuke thee.'
So also we desire that those who will not humbly accept the rebuke of their
neighbours may be rebuked of the Lord. But, since Michael says, 'The Lord
rebuke thee, O Satan,' and Zechariah says the same, the devil knows well
whether the Lord rebukes him or not; and must acknowledge the manner of the
rebuke."

   Then, after a passage too long to insert here, he adds:

   "We believe that not only those who have committed great sins will be
cast out from the kingdom of heaven, such as fornicators and adulterers,
and those who defile themselves with mankind, and thieves, but those also
who have done evil of a less flagrant kind, since it is written;(5)
'Neither drunkards nor evil speakers shall inherit the kingdom of God;" and
that the standard by which men will be judged is as much the goodness as
the severity of God. Therefore we strive to act thoughtfully in all things,
in drinking wine, and in moderation of language, so that we dare not speak
evil of any man. Now, because, through the fear of God, we are careful not
to utter maledictions against any one, remembering that the words 'He dared
not bring against him a railing accusation,' are spoken of Michael in his
dealing with the devil; as it is said also in another place,(1) 'They set
at naught dominions and rail at dignities;' certain of these men who seek
for matters of contention, ascribe to us and our teaching the blasphemy (as
to which they have to lay to heart the words which apply to them, 'Neither
drunkards nor evil speakers shall inherit the kingdom of God'), namely,
that the father of wickedness find perdition of those who shall be cast out
of the kingdom of God can be saved; a thing which not even a madman can
say."

   The rest which comes in the same letter he has(2) set down instead of
the later words of Origen which I have translated: "Now, because through
the fear of God we  are careful not to utter maledictions against  any
one," and so on; he fraudulently cuts off the earlier part, on which the
later depends,  and begins to translate the letter, as though the former
part began with this statement, and says:

   "Some of those who delight in bringing complaints against their
neighbours, ascribe to us and our teaching the crime of a blasphemy, which
we have never spoken, (as to which they must consider whether they are
willing to stand by the decree which says 'The evil speakers shall not
inherit the kingdom of God,') for they say that I assert that the father of
the wickedness and perdition of those who shall be east out of the kingdom
of God, that is, the devil, will be saved; a thing which no man even though
he had taken leave of his senses and was manifestly insane could say."

   19. Now compare the words of Origen, which I have translated word for
word above, with these which by him have been turned into Latin, or rather
overturned; and you will see clearly how great a discrepancy between them
there is, not only of word but of meaning. I beg you not to consider my
translation wearisome because it is longer; for the object I had in
translating the whole passage was to exhibit the purpose which be had in
suppressing the earlier part. There exists in Greek a dialogue between
Origen and Candidus the defender of the heresy of Valentinian, in which I
confess it seems to me when I read it that I am looking on at a fight
between two Andabatian gladiators. Candidus maintains that the Son is of
the substance of the Father,  falling into the error of asserting a Probole
or Production.(1) On the other side, Origen, like Arius and Eunomius,
refuses to admit that He is produced or born, lest God the Father should
thus be divided into parts; but he says that He was a sublime and most
excellent creation who came into being by the will of the Father like other
creatures. They then come to a second question. Candidus asserts that the
devil is of a nature wholly evil which can never be saved. Against this
Origen rightly asserts that he is not of perishable substance, but that it
is by his own will that he felt and can be saved. This Candidus falsely
turns into a reproach against Origen, as if he had said that the diabolical
nature could be saved. What therefore Candidus had falsely accused him of,
Origen refutes. But we see that in this Dialogue alone Origen accuses the
heretics of having falsified his writings, not in the other books about
which no question was ever raised. Otherwise, if we are to believe that all
which is heretical is not due to Origen but to the heretics, while almost
all his books are full of these errors, nothing of Origen's will remain,
but everything must be the work of those of whose names we are ignorant.

   It is not enough for him to calumniate the Greeks and the men of old
time, about whom the distance either of time or space gives him the power
to tell any falsehood he pleases. He comes to the Latins, and first takes
the case of Hilary the Confessor, whose book, he states, was falsified by
the heretics after the Council of Ariminum. A question arose about him on
this account in a council of bishops, and he then ordered the book to be
brought from his own house. The book in its heretical shape was in his
desk, though he did not know it; and when it was produced, the author of
the book was condemned as a heretic and excommunicated, and left the
council room. This is the story, a mere dream of his own, which he tells to
his intimates; and he imagines his authority to be so great that no one
will dare to contradict him when he says such things. I will ask him a few
questions. In what city was the synod held by which Hilary was
excommunicated? What were the names of the Bishops present? Who subscribed
the sentence? Who were content, and who non-content? Who were the consuls
of the year? and who was the emperor who ordered the assembly of the
council? Were the Bishops present those of Gaul alone, or of Italy and
Spain as well? and for what purpose was the council called together? You
tell us none of these things; yet, in order to defend Origen, you treat as
a criminal and as excommunicated a man of the highest eloquence, the very
clarion of the Latin tongue against the Arians. But we are in the presence
of a confessor, and even his calumnies must be borne with patience. He next
passes to Cyprian the illustrious martyr, and he tells us that a book by
Tertullian entitled "On the Trinity" is read as one of his works by the
partisans of the Macedonian heresy at Constantinople. In this charge of his
he tells two falsehoods. The book in question is not Tertullian's, nor does
it pass under the name of Cyprian. It is by Novatian and is called by his
name; the peculiarity of the style proves the authorship of the work.

   20. What nonsense is this out of which they fabricate a charge against
me! It seems hardly worth while to notice it. It is a story of my own about
the council held by Damasus Bishop of Rome, and I, under the name of a
certain friend of his, am attacked for it. He bad given me some papers
about church affairs to get copied; and the story describes a trick
practised by the Apollinarians who borrowed one of these, a book of
Athanasius' to read in which occur the words(1) 'Dominicus homo,' and
falsified it by first scratching out the words, and then writing them in
again on the erasure, so that it might appear, not that the book bad been
falsified by them, but that the words had been added by me. I beg you, my
dearest friend, that in these matters of serious interest to the church,
where doctrinal truth is in question, and we are seeking for the authority
of our predecessors for the well-being of our souls to put away silly stuff
of this kind, and not take mere after-dinner stories as if they were
arguments. For it is quite possible that, even after you have heard the
true story from me, another who does not know it may declare that it is
made up, and composed in elegant language by you like a mine of Philistion
or a song of Lentulus or Marcellus.

   21. To what point will not rashness reach when once the reins which
check it are relaxed? After telling us of the excommunication of Hilary,
the heretical book falsely bearing the name of Cyprian, the successive
erasure and insertion in the work  of Athanasius made while I was asleep,
he as a last effort breaks forth into an attack upon the pope Epiphanius:
the chagrin engendered in his heart because Epiphanius in the letter which
he wrote to the bishop John had called him a heretic, he pours out in his
apology for Origen, and comforts himself with these words:

   "The whole truth, which has been hidden, must here be laid bare. It is
impossible that any man should exercise so unrighteous a judgment as to
judge unequally where the cases are equal. But the fact is, the prompters
of those who defame Origen are men who either make it a habit to discourse
in the churches at great length or write books, the whole of which, both
books and discourse are taken from Origen. To prevent men therefore from
discovering their plagiarism, the crime of which can be concealed so long
as they act ungratefully towards their master, they deter all simple
persons from reading him. One of them, who considers himself to have a
necessity laid upon him to speak evil of Origen through every nation and
tongue, as if that were to preach the Gospel, once declared in the audience
of a vast multitude of the brethren that he had read six thousand of his
books. If he read them, as he is wont to declare, in order to know what
harm there was in him, ten or twenty books, or at most thirty, would have
been sufficient for that knowledge. To read six thousand books is not like
one who wants to know the harm and the errors that are in him, but like one
who consecrates almost his whole life to studies conducted under his
tuition. How then can he claim to be listened to when he blames those who,
for the sake of instruction, have read a small portion of his works, taking
care to maintain whole their own system of belief anti their piety?"

   22. Who are these men who are wont to dispute at such great length in
the churches, and to write books, and whose discourses and writings are
taken wholly from Origen; these men who are afraid of their literary thefts
becoming known, and shew ingratitude towards their master, and who
therefore deter men of simple mind from reading him? You ought to mention
them by name, and designate the men themselves. Are the reverend bishops(1)
Anastasius and Theophilus, Venerius and Chromatius, and the whole council
of the Catholics both in the East and in the West, who publicly denounce
him as a heretic, to be esteemed to be plagiarists of his books? Are we to
believe that, when they preach in the churches, they do not preach the
mysteries of the Scriptures, but merely repeat what they have stolen from
Origen? Is it not enough for you to disparage them all in general, but you
must specially aim the spear of your pen against a reverend and eminent
Bishop of the church? Who is this who considers that he has a necessity
laid on him of reviling Origen, as the Gospel which he must preach among
all nations and tongues? this man who proclaimed in the audience of a vast
multitude of the brethren that he had read six thousand of his books? You
yourself were in the very centre of that multitude and company of the
brethren, when, as he complains in his letter,(1) the monstrous doctrines
of Origen were enlarged upon by you. Is it to be imputed to him as a crime
thai he knows the Greek, the Syrian, the Hebrew, the Egyptian, and in part
also the Latin language? Then, I suppose, the Apostles and Apostolic men,
who spoke with tongues, are to be condemned; and you who know two languages
may deride me who know three. But as for the six thousand books which you
pretend that be has read, who will believe that you are speaking the truth,
or that he was capable of telling such a lie? If indeed Origen had written
six thousand books, it is possible that a man of great learning, who had
been trained from his infancy in sacred literature might have read books
alien from his own convictions, because he had an inquiring spirit and a
love of learning. But how could be read what Origen never wrote? Count up
the index contained in the third volume of Eusebius, in which is his life
of Pamphilus: you will not find, I do not say six thousand, but not a third
of that number of books. I have by me the letter of the above named
Pontiff, in which he gives his answer to this calumny of yours uttered when
you were still in the East; and it confutes this most manifest falsehood
with the open countenance of truth.

   23. After all this you dare to say ill your Apology, that you are not
the defender nor the champion of Origen, though you think that Eusebius and
Pamphilus said all too little in his defence. I shall try to write a reply
to those works in another treatise if God grants me a sufficient span of
life. For the present let it suffice that I have met your assertions, and
that I have set the careful reader on his guard by stating that I never saw
in writing the book which was known as the work of Pamphilus till I read it
in your own manuscript. It was no great concern of mine to know what was
written: in favour of a heretic, and therefore I always took it that the
work of Pamphilus was different from that of Eusebius; but, after the
question had been raised, I wished to reply to their works, and with this
object I read what each of them had to say in Origen's behalf; and then I
discerned clearly that the first of Eusebius' six books was the same which
you had published both in Greek and Latin as the single book of Pamphilus,
only altering the opinion shout the Son and the Holy Spirit, which bore on
their face the mark of open blasphemy. It was thus that, when my friend,
Dexter, who held the office of praetorian prefect, asked me, ten years ago,
to make a list for him of the writers of our faith,(1) placed among the
various treatises assigned to various authors this book as composed by
Pamphilus, supposing the matter to be as it had been brought before the
public by you and by your disciples. But, since Eusebius himself says that
Pamphilus wrote nothing except some short letters to his friends, and the
first of his six books contains the precise words which are fictitiously
given by you under the name of Pamphilus, it is plain that your object in
circulating this book was to introduce heresy under the authority of a
martyr. I cannot allow you to make my mistake a cloak for your fraud, when
you first pretend that the book is by Pamphilus and then pervert many of
its passages so as to make them different in Latin from what they are in
Greek. I believed the book to be by the writer whose name it bore, just as
I did in reference to the <greek>Peri</greek>'A<greek>rkpn</greek> and many
other of the works of Origen and of other Greek writers, which I never read
fill now, and am now compelled to read, because the question of heresy has
been raised, and l wish to know what ought to be avoided and what opposed.
In my youth, therefore, I translated only the homilies which he delivered
in public, and in which there are fewer causes of offence; and this in
ignorance and at the request of others: I did not try to prejudice men by
means of the parts which they approved in favour of the acceptance of those
which are evidently heretical. At all events, to cut short a long
discussion, I can point out whence I received the
<greek>Peri</greek>'A<greek>rkpn</greek>, namely, from those who copied it
from your manuscript. We want in like manner to know whence your copy of it
came; for if you are unable to name any one else as the source from which
it was derived, you will yourself be convicted of falsifying it.(2) " A
good man from the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth what is good."
A tree of a good stock is known by the sweetness of its fruit.

24. My brother Eusebius writes to me that, when he was at a meeting of
African bishops which had been called for certain ecclesiastical affairs,
he found there a letter purporting to be written by me, in which I
professed penitence and confessed that it was through the influence of the
press in my youth that I had been led to turn the Scriptures into Latin
from the Hebrew; in all of which there is not a word of truth. When I heard
this, I was stupefied. But one witness was not enough; even Cato was not
believed on his unsupported evidence:(1) "In the mouth of two or three
witnesses shall every word be established." Letters were soon brought me
from many brethren in Rome asking about this very matter, whether the facts
were as was stated: and they pointed in a way to make me weep to the person
by whom the letter had been circulated among the people. He who dared to do
this, what will he not dare to do? It is well that ill will has not a
strength equal to its intentions. Innocence would be dead long ago if
wickedness were always allied to power, and calumny could prevail in all
that it seeks to accomplish. It was impossible for him, accomplished as he
was, to copy any style and manner of writing, whatever their value may be;
amidst all his tricks and his fraudulent assumption of another man's
personality, it was evident who he was. It is this same man, then, who
wrote this fictitious letter of retractation in my name, making out that my
translation of the Hebrew books was bad, who, we now hear, accuses me of
having translated the Holy Scriptures with a view to disparage the
Septuagint. In any case, whether my translation is right or wrong, I am to
be condemned: I must either confess that in my new work I was wrong, or
else that by my new version I have aimed a blow at the old. I wonder that
in this letter he did not make me out as guilty of homicide, or adultery or
sacrilege or parricide or any of the vile things which the silent working
of the mind can revolve within itself. Indeed I ought to be grateful to him
for having imputed to me no more than one act of error or false dealing out
of the whole forest of possible crimes. Am I likely to have said anything
derogatory to the seventy translators, whose work I carefully purged from
corruptions arid gave to Latin readers many years ago, and daily expound it
at our conventual gatherings;(2) whose version of the Psalms has so long
been the subject of my meditation and my song? Was I so foolish as to wish
to forget in old age what I learned in youth? All my treatises have been
woven out of statements warranted by their version. My commentaries on the
twelve prophets are an explanation of their version as well as my own. How
uncertain must the labours of men ever be! and how contrary at times to
their own intentions are the results which men's studies reach. I thought
that I deserved well of my countrymen the Latins by this version, and bad
given them an incitement to learning; for it is not despised even by the
Greeks now that it is retranslated into their language; yet it is now made
the subject of a charge against me; and I find that the food pressed upon
them turns upon the stomach. What is there in human life that can be safe
if innocence is made the object of accusation? I am the householder' who
finds that while he slept the enemy has sown tares among his wheat.(2) "The
wild boar out of the wood has rooted up my vineyard, and the strange wild
beast has devoured it." I keep silence, but a letter that is not mine
speaks against me. I am ignorant of the crime laid against me, yet I am
made to confess the crime all  through the world.(3) "Woe is me, my mother,
that thou hast borne me a man to be judged and condemned(4) in the whole
earth."

   25. All my prefaces to the books of the Old Testament, some specimens
of which I subjoin, are witnesses for me on this point; and  it is needless
to state the matter otherwise  than it is stated in them. I will begin
therefore with Genesis. The Prologue is as follows:

   I have received letters so long and eagerly desired from my dear
Desiderius(5) who, as if the  future had been foreseen, shares his name
with Daniel,(6) entreating me to put our friends in possession of a
translation of the Pentateuch from Hebrew into Latin. The work is certainly
hazardous and it is exposed to the(7) attacks of my calumniators, who
maintain that it is through contempt of the Seventy that I have set to work
to forge a new version to take the place of the old. They thus test ability
as they do wine; whereas I have again and again declared that I dutifully
offer, in the Tabernacle of God what I can, and have pointed out that the
great gifts which one man brings are not marred by the inferior gifts of
another. But I was stimulated to undertake the task by the zeal of Origen,
who blended with the old edition Theodotion's translation and used
throughout the work as distinguishing marks the asterisk * and the obelus,
that is the star and the spit, the first of which makes what had previously
been defective to beam with light, while the other transfixes and
slaughters all that was superfluous. But I was encouraged above all by the
authoritative publications of the Evangelists and Apostles, in which we
read much taken from the Old Testament which is not found in our
manuscripts. For example, 'Out of Egypt have I called my Son' (Matt. ii.
15): ' For he shall be called a Nazarene' (Ibid. 23): and 'They shall look
on him whom they pierced' (John xix. 37): and 'Rivers of living water shall
flow out of his belly' (John vii. 38): and 'Things which eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, which God hath
prepared for them that love him ' (1. Cor. ii. 9), and many other passages
which lack their proper context. Let us ask our opponents then where these
things are written, and when they are unable to tell, let us produce them
from the Hebrew. The first passage is in Hosea, (xi. 1), the second in
Isaiah (xi. 1), the third in Zechariah (xii. 10), the fourth in Proverbs
(xviii. 4), the fifth also in Isaiah (lxiv. 4). Being ignorant of all this
many follow the ravings of the Apocrypha, and prefer to the inspired books
the melancholy trash which comes to us from Spain.(1) It is not for me to
explain the causes of the error. The Jews gay it was deliberately and
wisely done to prevent (2)Ptolemy who was a monotheist from thinking the
Hebrews acknowledged two deities. And that which chiefly influenced them in
thus acting was the fact that the king appeared to be  falling into
Platonism. In a word, wherever Scripture evidenced some sacred truth
respecting Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, they either translated the passage
differently, or passed it over altogether in silence, so that they might
both satisfy the king, and not divulge the secrets of the faith. I do not
know whose false imagination led him to invent the story of the a seventy
cells at Alexandria, in which, though separated from each other, the
translators were said to have written the same words. Aristeas,(4) the
champion of that same Ptolemy, and Josephus, long after, relate nothing of
the kind; their account is that the Seventy assembled in one basilica
consulted together, and did not prophesy. For it is one thing to be a
prophet, another to be a translator. The former through the Spirit,
foretells things to come; the latter must use his learning and facility in
speech to translate what he understands. It can hardly be that we must
suppose Tully was inspired with oratorical spirit when he translated
Xenophon's Oeconomics, Plato's Protagoras, and the oration of Demosthenes
in defence of Ctesiphon. Otherwise the Holy Spirit must have quoted the
same books in one sense through the Seventy Translators, in another through
the Apostles, so that, whereas they said nothing of a given matter, these
falsely affirm that it was so written. What then? Are we condemning our
predecessors? By no means; but following the zealous labours of those who
have preceded us we contribute such work as lies in our power in the name
of the Lord. They translated before the Advent of Christ, and expressed in
ambiguous terms that which they knew not. We after His Passion and
Resurrection write not prophecy so much as history. For one style is
suitable to what we hear, another to what we see. The better we understand
a subject, the better we describe it. Hearken then, my rival: listen, my
calumniator; I do not condemn, I do not censure the Seventy, but I am bold
enough to prefer the Apostles to them all. It is the Apostle through whose
mouth I hear the voice of Christ, and I read that in the classification of
spiritual gifts they are placed before prophets (1 Cor. xii. 28; Eph. iv.
11), while interpreters occupy almost the lowest place. Why are you
tormented with jealousy? Why do you inflame the minds of the ignorant
against me? Wherever in translation I seem to you to go wrong, ask the
Hebrews, consult their teachers in different towns. The words which exist
in their Scriptures concerning Christ your copies do not contain. The case
is different if they have(1) rejected passages which were afterward used
against them by the Apostles, and the Latin texts are more correct than the
Greek, the Greek than the Hebrew.

   [Chapters 26 to 32 are taken up with the quotation, almost in full, of
the Preface to the Vulgate translation of the books of the Old Testament.
It is unnecessary to give them here. They have all the same design as the
Preface to Genesis already given, namely to meet the objections of those
who represented the work as a reproach to the LXX which was then supposed
to have almost the authority of inspiration. The same arguments,
illustrations, and even words, are reiterated. Readers who may desire to go
more fully into Jerome's statements will find these Prefaces translated at
length in his works, Vol. VI of this Series.]

   33. In reference to Daniel my answer will be that I did not say that he
was not a prophet; on the contrary, I confessed in the very beginning of
the Preface that he was a prophet. But I wished to show what was the
opinion upheld by the Jews; and what were the arguments on which they
relied for its proof. I also told the reader that the version read in the
Christian churches was not that of the Septuagint translators but that of
Theodotion. It is true, I said that the Septuagint version was in this book
very different from the original, and that it was condemned by the right
judgment of the churches of Christ; but the fault was not mine who only
stated the fact, but that of those who read the version. We have four
versions to choose from: those of Aquila, Symmachus, the Seventy, and
Theodotion. The churches choose to read Daniel in the version of
Theodotion. What sin have I committed in following the judgment of the
churches? But when I repeat what the Jews say against the Story of Susanna
and the Hymn of the Three Children, and the fables of Bel and the Dragon,
which are not contained in the Hebrew Bible, the man who makes this a
charge against me proves himself to be a fool and a slanderer; for I
explained not what I thought but what they commonly say against us. I did
not reply to their opinion in the Preface, because I was studying brevity,
and feared that I should seem to he writing not a Preface but a book. I
said therefore, "As to which this is not the time to enter into
discussion." Otherwise from the fact that I stated that Porphyry had said
many things against this prophet, and called, as witnesses of this,
Methodius, Eusebius, and Apollinarius, who have replied to his folly in
many thousand lines, it will be in his power to accuse me for not baring
written in my Preface against the books of Porphyry. If there is any one
who pays attention to silly things like this, I must tell him loudly and
free that no one is compelled to read what he does not want; that I wrote
for those who asked me, not for those who would scorn me, for the grateful
not the carping, for the earnest not the indifferent. Still, I wonder that
a man should read the version of Theodotion the heretic and judaizer, and
should scorn that of a Christian, simple and sinful though he may be.

   34. I beg you, my most sweet friend, who are so curious that you even
know my dreams, and that yon scrutinize for purposes of accusations all
that I have written during these many years without fear of future calumny;
answer me, how is it you do not know the prefaces of the very books on
which you ground your charges against me? These prefaces, as if by some
prophetic foresight, gave the answer to the calumnies that were coming,
thus fulfilling the proverb, "The antidote before the poison." What harm
has been done to the churches by my translation?  You bought up, as I knew,
at great cost the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theo-dotion, and the
Jewish authors of the fifth and sixth translations. Your Origen, or, that I
may not seem to be wounding you with fictitious praises, our Origen,(for I
may call him ours for his genius and learning, though not for the truth of
his doctrines) in all his books explains and expounds not only the
Septuagint but the Jewish versions. Eusebius and Didymus do the same. I do
not mention Apollinarius, who, with a laudable zeal though not according to
knowledge, attempted to patch up into one garment the rags of all the
translations, and to weave a consistent text of Scripture at his own
discretion, not according to any sound rule of criticism. The Hebrew
Scriptures are used by apostolic men; they are used, as is evident, by the
apostles and evangelists. Our Lord and Saviour himself whenever he refers
to the Scriptures, takes his quotations from the Hebrew; as in the instance
of the words(1) "He that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out
of his belly shall flow rivers of living water," and in the words used on
the cross itself, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," which is by interpretation
"My God, my God, why hast thou  forsaken me?" not, as it is given by the
Septuagint, "My God, my God, look upon me, why hast thou forsaken me?" and
many similar cases. I do not say this in order to aim a blow at the seventy
translators; but I assert that the Apostles of Christ bare an authority
superior to theirs. Wherever the Seventy agree with the Hebrew, the
apostles took their quotations from that translation; but, where they
disagree, they set down in Greek what they had found in the Hebrew. And
further, I give a challenge to my accuser. I have shown that many things
are set down in the New Testament as coming from the older books, which are
not to be found in the Septuagint; and I have pointed out that these exist
in the Hebrew. Now let him show that there is anything in the New Testament
which comes from tile Septuagint but which is not found in the Hebrew, and
our controversy is at an end.

   35. By all this it is made clear, first that the version of the Seventy
translators which has gained an established position by having been so long
in use, was profitable to the churches, because that by its means the
Gentiles heard of the coming of Christ before he came; secondly, that the
other translators are not to be reproved, since it was not their own works
that they published but the divine books which they translated; and,
thirdly, that my own familiar friend should frankly accept from a Christian
and a friend what he has taken great pains to obtain from the Jews and has
written down for him at great cost. I have exceeded the bounds of a letter;
and, though I had taken pen in hand to contend against a wicked heresy, I
have been compelled to make answer on my own behalf, while waiting for my
friend's three books, and in a state of constant mental suspense about the
charges he had heaped up against me. It is easier to guard against one who
professes hostility than to make head against an enemy who lurks under the
guise of a friend.


JEROME'S APOLOGY IN ANSWER TO RUFINUS


BOOK III.

   I have read the letter(1) which you in your' wisdom have written me.
You inveigh against me, and, though you once praised me and called me true
partner and brother, you now write books to summon me to reply to the
charges with which you terrify me. I see that in you are fulfilled the
words of Solomon: (2)"In the mouth of the foolish is the rod of(3)
contumely," and (4)" A fool receives not the words of prudence, unless you
say what is passing in his heart;" and the words of Isaiah: (5)"The fool
will speak folly, and his heart will understand vain things, to practise
iniquity and speak falsehood against the Lord." For what need was there for
you to send me whole volumes full of accusation and malediction, and to
bring them before the public, when in the end of your letter you threaten
me with death if I dare to reply to your slanders--I beg pardon--to your
praises? For your praises and your accusations amount to the same thing;
from the same fountain proceed both sweet and bitter. I beg you  to set me
the example of the modesty and shamefacedness which you recommend to me;
you accuse another of lying: cease to be a liar yourself. I wish to give no
one an occasion of stumbling, and I will not become your accuser; for I
have not to consider merely what you deserve but what is becoming in me. I
tremble at our Savior's words. (6)" Whosoever shall cause one of these
little ones that believe in me to stumble, it were better for him that a
great mill stone were hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the
depths of the sea;" and(7) "Woe unto the world because of occasions of
stumbling: for it must needs be that occasions arise; but woe to the man
through whom the occasion cometh." It  would have been possible for me too
to pile up falsehoods against you and to say that I had heard or seen what
no one had observed, so that among the ignorant my effrontery might be
taken for veracity, and my violence for resolution. But far be it from me
to be an imitator of you, and to do thyself what I denounce in you. He who
is capable of doing filthy things may use filthy words. (1)"The evil man
out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil;
for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." You may count it
as good fortune that one whom you once called friend but now accuse has no
mind to make vile imputations against you. I say this not from any dread of
the sword of your accusation, but because I prefer to be accused than to be
the accuser, to suffer an injury than to do one. I know the precept of the
Apostle: (2)"Dearly beloved avenge not yourselves but rather give place
unto wrath: for it is written Vengeance is mine, I will repay saith the
Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger feed him, if he thirst give him
drink; for in so doing thou shall heap coals of fire upon his head." For he
that avenges himself cannot claim the vindication of the Lord.

   2. But, before I make my answer to your letter, I must expostulate with
you; you who are first in age among the thanks, good presbyter, follower of
Christ; is it possible for you to wish to kill your brother, when even to
hate him is to be a homicide? Have you learned from your Saviour the lesson
that if one strike you on the one cheek you should turn to him the other
also? Did not he make answer to the man who struck him,(3) "If I have
spoken evil, bear witness of the evil, but if well, why smitest thou me?"
You threaten me with death, which can be inflicted on us even by serpents.
To die is the lot of all, to commit homicide only of the weak man. What
then? If you do not kill me shall I never die? Perhaps I ought to be
grateful to you that you turn this necessity into a virtue We read of
Apostles quarrelling, namely Paul and Barnabas who were angry with each
other on account of John whose surname was Mark; those who were united by
the bonds of Christ's gospel were separated for a voyage; but they still
remained friends. Did not the same Paul resist Peter to the face because he
did not walk uprightly in the Gospel? Yet he speaks of him as his
predecessor in the Gospel, and as a pillar of the church; and he lays
before him his mode of preaching,(1) ' lest he should be running, or had
run in vain.' Do not children differ from parents and wives from husbands
in religions matters, while yet domestic affections remain unimpaired. If
you are as I am, why should you hate me? Even if you believe differently,
why should you wish to kill me? Is it so, that whoever differs from you is
to be slain? I call upon Jesus who will judge what I am now writing and
your letter also, as a witness upon my conscience, that when the reverend
bishop Chromatius begged the to keep silence, my wish was to do so, and
thus to make an end of our dissensions, and to overcome evil with good.
But, now that yon threaten me with destruction, I am compelled to reply;
otherwise, my silence will be taken as an acknowledgment of the crime, and
you will interpret my moderation as the sign of an evil conscience.

   3. The dilemma in which I am placed is of your making: it is brought
out, not from the resources of dialectics, of which you are ignorant, but
from among the tools of the murderer and with an intention like his. If I
keep silence, I am held guilty: if I speak, I become an evil speaker. You
at once forbid me to answer and compel me. Well, then; I must shun excess
on both sides. I will say nothing that is injurious; but I must dissipate
the charges made against me, for it is impossible not to be afraid of a man
who is prepared to kill you. And I will do this in the order of what you
have now set before me, leaving the rest as they are in those most learned
books of yours which I confuted before I had read them.

   You say that 'you sent your accusation against me not to the many but
only to those who had been offended by what I had said; for one ought to
speak to Christians not for display but for edification.' Whence then, I
beg you to consider, did the report of your having written these books
reach me? Who was it t that sowed them broadcast through Rome and Italy and
the islands of the coast of Dalmatia? How did these charges against me ever
come to my ears, if they were only lurking in your desk, and those of your
friends? How can you dare to say that you are speaking as a Christian not
for display but for edification when you set yourself in mature age to say
things against your equal which a murderer could hardly say of a thief, or
a harlot against one of her class, or a buffoon against a farce-player? You
have for ever so long been labouring to bring forth these mountains of
accusations against me and sharpening these swords to pierce my throat.
Your cries have been as loud as Ceres' complaints(1) or a driver's shouts
to his horses. Was this to make all the provinces through which they
resounded read the praise you wrote of me? and recite your panegyrics upon
me in every street, every corner, even in the weaving-shops of the women?
This is the religious restraint and Christian edification of which you
speak. Your reserve, your reticence is such that men come to me from the
West, crowd upon crowd, and tell me of your abuse of me; and this, though
only from memory, yet with such exact agreement that I was obliged(2) to
make my answer, not to your writings which I bad not then read, but to what
was said to be contained in them, and to intercept with the shield of truth
the missiles of mendacity which were flying about through all the world.

   4. Your letter goes on:

   "Pray do not trouble yourself to give a large sum of gold to bribe my
secretary, as your friends did in the case of my papers containing the
Peri` Archw^n before they had been corrected and brought to completion, so
that they might more easily falsify documents which no one possessed, or at
least very few. Accept the document which I send you gratis, though you
would be glad to pay a large sum to buy it."

   I should have thought you would be ashamed of such a beginning of your
work. What! I bribe your Secretary! Is there any one who would attempt to
vie with the wealth of Croesus(3) and Darius?(3) who is there that does not
tremble when he is suddenly confronted with a Demaratus(4) or a Crassus?(5)
Have you become so brazen-faced, theft you put your trust in lies and think
lies will protect you and that we shall believe every fiction which you
choose to frame? Who then was it who stole that letter in which you were so
highly praised, from the cell of our brother Eusebius? Whose artfulness was
it, and whose accomplices, through which a certain document was found in
the lodgings of that Christian woman Fabiola and of that wise man Oceanus,
which they themselves had never seen? Do you think that you are innocent
because you can cast upon others all the imputations which properly belong
to you? Is every one who offends you, however guiltless and harmless he may
be, at once held to become a criminal? You think so, I suppose, because you
are possessed of that through which the chastity of Danae(1) was broken
down, that which had more power with Gihazi than his master's sacred
character, that for which Judas betrayed his Master.(2)

   5. Let us understand what was the wrong done by my friend(2) who, you
say 'falsified parts of your papers when they had not yet been corrected
nor carried to completion, and it was the more possible to falsify them
because very few if any as yet possessed them.'(4) I have already said, and
I now repeat, with protestations in the presence of God, that I did not
approve his accusing you, nor of any Christian accusing another Christian;
for what need is there that matters which can be corrected or set right in
private should be published abroad to the stumbling and fall of many? But
since each man lives for his own gullet, and a man does not by becoming
your friend become master of your will, while I blame the accusing of a
brother even when it is true, so also I cannot accept against a man of
saintly character this accusation of falsify-ing your papers. How could a
man who only knows Latin change anything in a translation from the Greek?
Or how could he take out or put in anything in such books as the Peri`
Archw^n, in which everything is so closely knit together that out part
hangs upon another, and anything that may be taken out or' put in to suit
your will must at once show out like a patch on a garment? What you ask me
to do, it is for you to do yourself. Put on at least a small measure of
natural if not of Christian modesty in your assertions; do not despise and
trample upon your conscience, and imagine yourself justified by a show of
words, when the facts are against you. If Eusebius bought your uncorrected
papers for money in order to falsify them, produce the genuine papers which
have not been falsified: and if you can shew that there is nothing
heretical in them, he will become amenable to the charge of forgery. But,
however much you may alter or correct them, you will not make them out to
be catholic. If the error existed only in the words or in some few
statements, what is bad might be cut off and what is good be substituted
for it. But, when the whole discussion(1) proceeds on a single principle,
namely, the notion that the whole universe of reasonable creatures have
fallen by their own will, and will hereafter return to a condition of
unity: and that again from that starting point another fall will begin:
what is there that you can amend, unless you alter the whole book? But if
you were to think of doing this, you would no longer be translating another
man's work but composing a work of your own.

   However, I hardly see which way your argument tends. I suppose you mean
that the papers being uncorrected and not having undergone a final revising
were more easily falsified by Eusebius. Perhaps I am stupid; but the
argument appears to me somewhat foolish and pointless. If the papers were
uncorrected and had not undergone their final revision, the errors in them
mast be imputed not to Eusebius but to your sloth and delay in putting off
their correction; and all the blame that can be laid upon him is that he
circulated among the body of Christians writings which you had intended in
course of time to correct. But if, as you assert, Eusebius falsified them,
why do you put forward the allegation that they were uncorrected, and that
they had gone out before the public without their final revision? For
papers whether corrected or uncorrected are equally susceptible of
falsification. But, No one, you say possessed these books, or very few.
What contradictions this single sentence exhibits! If no one bad these
books, how could they be in the hands of a few? If a few possessed them,
why do you state falsely that there were none? Then, when you say that a
few had them, and by your own confession the statement that no one had them
is overthrown, what becomes of your complaint that your secretary was
bribed with money? Tell us the secretary's name, the amount oF the bribe,
the place, the intermediary, the recipient. Of course the traitor has been
cast off from you, and one convicted of so great a crime has been separated
from all familiarity with you. Is it not more likely to be true that the
copies of the work which Eusebius obtained were given him by those few
friends whom you speak of, especially since these copies agree and coincide
with one another so completely that there is not the difference of a single
stroke. We might ask also whether it was quite wise to give a copy to
others which you bad not yet corrected? The documents had not received
their last corrections, and yet other men possessed these errors of yours
which needed correction. Do you not see that your falsehood will not hold
together? Besides, what profit was there for you, at that particular
moment--how would it have helped you in escaping from the condemnation of
the bishops--that the book which was the subject of discussion should be
open to everyone, and that you should thus be refuted by your own words?
From all this it is clear, according to the epigram of the famous orator,
that you have a good will for a lie, but not the art of framing it.

   6. I will follow the order of your letter, and subjoin your very words
as you spoke them. "I admit, that, as you say, I praised, your eloquence in
my Preface; and I would praise it again now were it not that contrary to
the advice of your Tully, you make it hateful by excessive boastfulness."
Where have I boasted of my eloquence? I did not even accept willingly the
praise which you bestowed on it. Perhaps your reason for saying this is
that you do not wish, yourself, to be flattered by public praise given in
guile. Rest assured you shall be accused openly; you reject one who would
praise you; you shall have experience of out who openly arraigns you. I was
not so foolish as to criticize your illiterate style; no one can expose it
to condemnation so strongly as you do whenever you write. I only wished to
show your fellow-disciples who shared your lack of literary training what
progress you had made during your thirty years in the East, an illiterate
writer, who takes impudence for eloquence, and universal evil speaking a
sign of a good conscience. I am not going to administer the ferule; I do
not assume, as you put it, to apply the strokes of the leather thong to
teach an aged pupil his letters. But the fact is your eloquence and
teaching is so sparkling that we mere tract-writers cannot bear it, and you
dazzle our eyes with the acuteness of your talents to such an extent that
we must all seem to be envious of you; and we must really join in the
attempt to suppress you, for, if once you obtain the primacy among us as a
writer, and stand on the summit of the rhetorical arch, all of us who
profess to know anything will not be allowed to mutter a word. I am,
according to you, a philosopher and an orator, grammarian, dialectician,
one who knows Hebrew, Greek and Latin, a 'trilingual' man. On this
estimate, you also will be 'bilingual,' who know enough Latin and Greek to
make the Greek think you a Latin scholar and the Latin a Greek: and the
bishop Epiphanius will be a 'pentaglossic(1) man' since he speaks in five
languages against you and your favorite.(2) But I wonder at the rashness
which made you dare to say to one so accomplished as you profess to think
me: " You, whose accomplishments give you so many watchful eyes, how can
you be pardoned if you go wrong? How can you fail to be buried in the
silence of a never ending shame?" When I read this, and reflected that I
must somewhere or other have made a slip in my words (for (3) " if any man
does not go wrong in word, the same is a perfect man") and was expecting
that he was about to expose some of my faults; all of a sudden I came upon
the words: "Two days before the carrier of this letter set out your
declamation against me was put into my hands." What became then of those
threats of yours, and of your words: "How can you be pardoned if you go
wrong? How Call you fail to be covered with the silence of a never ending
shame?" Yet perhaps, notwithstanding the shortness of the time, you were
able to put this in order; or else you were intending to hire in one of the
learned sort, who would expect to find in my works the ornaments and gems
of an eloquence like yours. You wrote before this: "Accept the document
which I send which you wished to buy at a great price;" but now you speak
with the pretence of humility. "I intended to follow your example; but,
since the messenger who was returning to yon was hurrying back again I
thought it better to write shortly to you than at greater length to
others." In the meantime you boldly take pleasure in your illiteracy.
Indeed you once confessed it, declaring that ' it was superfluous to notice
a few faults of style, when it was acknowledged that there were faults in
every part.' I will not therefore find fault with you for putting down that
a document was acquired when you meant that it was bought; though acquiring
is said of things like in kind, whereas buying implies the counting out of
money: nor for such a sentence as " as he who was returning to you was
hurrying hack again" which is a redundancy worthy of the poorest style of
diction. I will only reply to the arguments, and will convict you, not of
solaecisms and barbarisms, but of falsehood, cunning and impudence.

   7. If it is true that you write a letter to me so as to admonish me,
and, because you wish that I should be reformed, and that you do not wish
that men should have a stumbling block put in their way, and that some may
be driven mad and others be put to silence; why do you write books
addressed to others against me, and scatter them by your myrmidons for the
whole world to read? And what becomes of your dilemma in which you try to
entangle me," Whom, best of masters, did you think to correct? If those to
whom you wrote, there was no fault to find with them; if me whom you
accuse, it was not to me that you wrote"? And I will reply to you in your
own words: "Whom did you wish to correct, unlearned master? Those who had
done no wrong? or me to whom you did not write? You think your leaders are
brutish and are all incapable of understanding your subtilty, or rather
your ill will, (for it was in this that the serpent was more subtile than
all the beasts in paradise,) in asking that my admonition to you should be
of a private character, when you were pressing an indictment against me in
public. You are not ashamed to call this indictment of yours an Apology:
And you complain that I oppose a shield to your poniard, and with much
religiosity and sanctimoniousness you assume the mask of humility, and say:
"If I had erred, why did you write to others, and not try to confute me?" I
will retort on you this very point. What you complain that I did not do,
why did you not do yourself? It is as if a man who is attacking another
with kicks and fisticuffs, and flints him intending to shew fight, should
say to him: " Do you not know the command, 'If a man smites you on the
cheek, turn to him the other'?" It comes to this, my good sir, you are
determined to beat me, to strike out my eye; and then, when I bestir myself
ever so little, you harp upon the precept of the Gospel. Would you like to
have all the windings of your cunning exposed?--those tricks of the foxes
who dwell among the ruins, of whom Ezekiel writes,(1) " Like foxes in the
desert, so are thy prophets, O Israel." Let me make you understand what you
have done. You praised me in your Preface in such a way that your praises
are made a ground of accusation against me, and if I had not declared
myself to be without any connexion with my admirer, I should have been
judged as a heretic. After I repelled your charges, that is your praises,
and without shewing ill will to you personally, answered the accusations,
not the accuser, anti inveighed against the heretics, to shew that, though
defamed by you, I was a catholic; you grew angry, and raved and composed
the most magnificent works against me; and when you had given them to all
men to read and repeat, letters came to me from Italy, and Rome and
Dalmatia, shewing each more clearly than the last, what all the encomiums
were worth with which in your former laudation you had decorated me.

   8. I confess, I immediately set to work to reply to the insinuations
directed against me, and tried with all my might to prove that I was no
heretic, and I sent these books of my Apology to those whom your book had
pained, so that your poison might be followed by my antidote. In reply to
this, you sent me your former books, and now send me this last letter, full
of injurious language and accusations. My good friend, what do you expect
me to do? To keep silence? That would be to acknowledge myself guilty. To
speak? But you hold your sword over my head, and threaten me with an
indictment, no longer before the church but before the law-courts. What
have I done that deserves punishment? Wherein have I injured you? Is it
that I have shewn myself not to be a heretic? or that I could not esteem
myself worthy of your praises? or that I laid bare in plain words the
tricks and perjuries of the heretics? What is all this to you who boast
yourself a true man and a catholic, and who shew more zeal in attacking me
than in defending yourself? Must I be thought to be attacking yon because I
defend myself? or is it impossible that you should be orthodox unless you
prove me to be a heretic? What help can it give you to be connected with
me? and what is the meaning of your action? You are accused by one set of
people and you answer only by attacking another. You find an attack made on
you by one man, and you turn your back upon him and attack another who was
for leaving you alone.

   9. I call Jesus the Mediator to witness that it is against my will, and
fighting against necessity, that I come down into the arena of this war of
words, and that, had you not challenged me, I would have never broken
silence. Even now, let your charges against me cease, and my defence will
cease. For it is no edifying spectacle that is presented to our readers,
that of two old men engaging in a gladiatorial conflict on account of a
heretic; especially when both of them wish to be thought catholics. Let us
leave off all favouring of heretics, and there will be no dispute between
us. We once were zealous in our praise of Origen; let us be equally zealous
in condemning him now that he is condemned by the whole world. Let us join
hands and hearts, and march with a ready step behind the two trophy-bearers
of the East and West.(1) We went wrong in our youth, let us mend our ways
in our age. If you are my brother, be glad that I have seen my errors; if I
am your friend, I must give you joy on your conversion. So long as we
maintain our strife, we shall be thought to hold the right faith not
willingly but of necessity. Our enmity prevents our affording the spectacle
of a true repentance. If our faith is one, if we both of us accept and
reject the same things, (and it is from this, as even Catiline testifies,
that firm friendships arise), if we are alike in our hatred of heretics,
and equally condemn our former mistakes, why should we set out to battle
against each other, when we have the same objects both of attack and
defence? Pardon me for having praised Origen's zeal for Scriptural learning
in my youthful clays before I fully knew his heresies; and I will grant you
forgiveness for having written an Apology for his works when your head was
grey.

   10. You state that my book came into your hands two days before you
wrote your letter to me, and that therefore you had no sufficient leisure
to make a reply. Otherwise, if you had spoken against me after full thought
and preparation, we might think that you were casting forth lightnings
rather than accusations. But even so veracious a person as you will hardly
gain credence when you tell its that a merchant of Eastern wares whose
business is to sell what he has brought from these parts and to buy Italian
goods to bring over here for sale, only stayed two days at Aquileia, so
that you were obliged to write your letter to me in a hurried and extempore
fashion. For your books which it took you three years to put into complete
shape are hardly more carefully written. Perhaps, however, you had no one
at hand then to amend your sorry productions, and this is the reason why
your literary journey is destitute of the aid of Pallas, and is intersected
by faults of style, as by rough places and chasms at every turn. It is
clear that this statement about the two days is false; you would not have
been able in that time even to read what I wrote, much less to reply to it;
so that it is evident that either you took a good many days in writing your
letter, which its elaborate style makes probable; or, if this is your hasty
style of composition, and yon can write so well off-hand, you would be very
negligent m your composition to write so much worse when you have had time
for thought.

   11. You state, with some prevarication, that you have translated from
the Greek what I had before translated into Latin; but I do not clearly
understand to what you are alluding, unless you are still bringing up
against me the Commentary on the Ephesians, and hardening yourself in your
effrontery, as if you had received no answer on this head. You stop your
ears and will not hear the voice of the charmer. What I have done in that
and other commentaries is to develop both my own opinion and that of
others, stating clearly which are catholic and which heretical. This is the
common rule and custom of those who undertake to explain books in
commentaries: They give at length in their exposition the various opinions,
and explain what is thought by themselves and by others. This is done not
only by those who expound the holy Scriptures but also by those who explain
secular books whether in Greek or in Latin. You, however, cannot screen
yourself in reference to the Peri` Archw^n by this fact; for you will be
convicted by your own Preface, in which you undertake that the evil parts
and those which have been added by heretics have been cut off but that all
that is best remains; so that all that you have written, whether good or
bad, must be held to be the work, not of the author whom you are
translating, but of yourself who have made the translation. Perhaps,
indeed, you ought to have corrected the errors of the heretics, and to have
set forth publicly what is wrong in Origen. But on this point, (since you
refer me to the document itself.) I have made you my answer before reading
your letter.

   12. About the book of Pamphilus, what happened to me was, not comical
as you call it, but perhaps ridiculous; namely that. after I had asserted
it to be by Eusebius not by Pamphilus, I stated at the end of the
discussion that I had for many years believed that it was by Pamphilus, and
that I had borrowed a copy of this book from you. You may judge how little
I fear your derision from the fact that even now I make the same statement.
I took it from your manuscript as being a copy of a work of Pamphilus. I
trusted in you as a Christian and as a monk: I did not imagine that you
would be guilty of such a wicked imposture. But, after that the question of
Origen's heresy was stirred throughout the world on account of your
translation of his work, I was more careful in examining copies of the
book, and in the library of Caesarea I found the six volumes of Eusebius'
Apology for Origen. As soon as I had looked through them, I at once
detected the book on the Son and the Holy Spirit which you alone have
published under the name of the martyr, altering most of its blasphemies
into words of a better meaning. And this I saw must have been done either
by Didymus or by you or some other (it is quite clear that you did it in
reference to the Peri` Archw^n) by this decisive proof, that Eusebius tells
us that Pamphilus published nothing of his own. It is for you therefore to
say from whence you obtained your copy; and do not, for the sake of
avoiding my accusation, say that it was from some one who is dead, or,
because you have no one to point to, name one who cannot answer for
himself. If this rivulet has its source in your desk, the inference is
plain enough, without my drawing it. But, suppose that the title of this
book and the name of the author has been changed by some other lover of
Origen, what motive had you for turning it into Latin? Evidently this,
that, through the testimony given to him by a martyr, all should trust to
the writings of Origen, since they were guaranteed beforehand by a witness
of such authority. But the Apology of this most learned man was not
sufficient for you; you must write a treatise of your own in his defence,
and, when these two documents had been widely circulated, you felt secure
in proceeding to translate the Peri` Archw^n itself from the Greek, and
commended it in a Preface, in which you said that some things in it had
been corrupted by the heretics, but that you had corrected them from a
study of others of Origen's writings. Then come in your praises of me for
the purpose of preventing any of my friends from speaking against you. You
put me forward as the trumpeter of Origen, you praise my eloquence to the
skies, so that you may drag down the faith into the mire; you call me
colleague and brother, and profess yourself the imitator of my works. Then,
while on the one hand you cry me up as having translated seventy homilies
of Origen, and some of his short treatises on the Apostle, in which you say
that I so smoothed things down that the Latin reader will find nothing in
them which is discrepant from the Catholic faith; now on the other hand you
brand these very books as heretical; and, obliterating your former praise,
you accuse the man whom you had preached up when you thought he would
figure as your ally, because you find that he is the enemy of your perfidy.
Which of us two is the calumniator of the martyr? I, who say that he was no
heretic, and that he did not write the book which is condemned by every
one; or you, who have published a book written by a man who was an Arian
and changed his name into that of the martyr? It is not enough for you that
Greece has been scandalized; you must press the book upon the ears of the
Latins, and dishonor an illustrious martyr as far as in you lies by your
translation. Your intention no doubt was not this; it was not to accuse me
but to make me serve for the defence of Origen's writings. But let me tell
you that the faith of Rome which was praised by the voice of an Apostle,
does not recognize tricks of this kind. A faith which has been guaranteed
by the authority of an Apostle cannot be changed though an Angel should
announce another gospel than that which he preached. Therefore, my brother,
whether the falsification of the book proceeds from you, as many believe,
or from another, as yon will perhaps try to persuade us, in which case you
have only been guilty of rashness in believing the composition of a heretic
to be that of a martyr, change the title, and free the innocence of the
Romans from this great peril. It is of no advantage to you to be the means
of a most illustrious martyr being condemned as a heretic: of one who shed
his blood for Christ being proud to be an enemy of the Christian faith.
Take another course: say, I found a book which I believed to be the work of
a martyr. Do not fear to be a penitent. I will not press you further. I
will not ask from whom you obtained it; you can name some dead man if you
please, or say you bought it from an unknown man in the street: for I do
not wish to see you condemned, but converted. It is better that it should
appear that you were in error than that the martyr was a heretic. At all
events, by some means or other, draw out your foot from its present
entanglement: consider what answer you will make in the judgment to come to
the complaints which the martyrs will bring against you.

   13. Moreover, you make a charge against yourself which has been brought
by no one against you, and make excuses where no one has accused you. You
say that you have read these and in my letter: " I want to know who has
given you leave when translating a book, to remove some things, change
others, and again add others." And you go on to answer yourself, and to
speak against me: "I say this to you Who I pray, has given you leave, in
your Commentaries, to put down some things out of Origen, some from
Apollinarius, some of your own, instead of all from Origen or from yourself
or from some other?" All this while, while you are aiming at something
different, you have been preferring a very strong charge against yourself;
and you have forgotten the old proverb, that those who speak falsehood
should have good memories. You say that I in my Commentaries have set down
some things out of Origen, some from Apollinarius, some of my own. If then
these things which I have set down under the names of others are the words
of Apollinarius and of Origen; what is the meaning of the charge which you
fasten upon me, that, when I say "Another says this," "The following is
some one's conjecture," that " other" or " some one" means myself? Between
Origen and Apollinarius there is a vast difference of interpretation, of
style, and of doctrine. When I set down discrepant opinions on the same
passage, am I to be supposed to accept both the contradictory views? But
more of this hereafter.

   14. Now I ask you this: Who may have blamed you for having either added
or changed or taken away certain things in the books of Origen, and have
put you to the question like a man on the horse-rack;(1) Are those things
which you put down in your translation bad or good? It is useless for you
to simulate innocence, and by some silly question to parry the force of the
true inquiry. I have never accused you for translating Origen for your own
satisfaction. I have done the same, and so have Victorinus, Hilary, and
Ambrose; but I have accused you for fortifying your translation of a
heretical work by writing a preface approving of it. You compel me to go
over the same ground, and to walk in the lines I myself have traced. For
you say in that Prologue that you have cut away what had been added by the
heretics; and have replaced it with what is good. If you have taken out the
false statement of the heretics, then what you have left or have added must
be either Origen's, or yours, and you have set them down, presumably, as
good. But that many of these are bad you cannot deny. " What is that," you
will say, " to me?" You must impute it to Origen; for I have done no more
than alter what had been added by the heretics. Tell us then for what
reason yon took out the bad things written by the heretics and left those
written by Origen untouched. Is it not clear that parts of the false
doctrines of Origen you condemned under the designation of the doctrines of
heretics, and others you accepted because you judged them to be not false
but true and consonant with your faith? It was these last about which I
inquired whether those things which you praised in your Preface were good
or bad: it was these which yon confessed you have left as perfectly good
when you cut out all that was worst; and I thus have placed you, as I said,
on the horse-rack, so that, if you say that they are good, you will be
proved to be a heretic, but if you say they are bad, you will at once be
asked: " Why then did you praise these bad things in your Preface?" And I
did not add the question which you craftily pretend that I asked; "Why did
yon by your translation bring evil doctrines to the ears of the Latins?"
For to exhibit what is bad may be done at times not for the sake of
teaching them but of warning men against them: so that the reader may be on
his guard not to follow the error, but may make light of the evils which he
knows, whereas if unknown they might become objects of wonder to him. Yet
after this, you dare to say that I am the author of writings of this kind,
whereas you, as a mere translator would be going beyond the translator's
province if you had chosen to correct anything, but, if you did not correct
anything, you acted as a translator alone. You would be quite right in
saying this if your translation of the Peri` Archw^n had no Preface; just
as Hilary, when he translated Origen's homilies took care to do it so that
both the good and evil of them should be imputed not to the translator but
to their own author. If you had not boasted that you had cut out the worst
and left the best, you would, in some way or other, have escaped from the
mire. But it is this that brings to nought the trick of your invention, and
keeps you bound on all sides, so that you cannot get out. And I must ask
you not to have too mean an opinion of the intelligence of your readers nor
to think that all who will read your writings are so dull as not to laugh
at you when they see you let real wounds mortify while you put plasters on
a healthy body.

   15. What your opinions are on the resurrection of the flesh, we have
already learned from your Apology. " No member will be cut off, nor any
part of the body destroyed." This is the clear and open profession which
you make in your innocence, and which you say is accepted by all the
bishops of Italy. I should believe your statement, but that the matter of
that book which is not Pamphilus' makes me doubt about you. And I wonder
that Italy should have approved what Rome rejected; that the bishops should
have accepted what the Apostolic see condemned.

   16. You further write that it was by my letters that you had been
informed that the pope Theophilus lately put forth an exposition of the
faith which has not yet reached you and you promise to accept whatever he
may have written. I am not aware that I ever said this, or that I sent any
letters of the sort. But you consent to things of which you are still in
uncertainty, and things as to which you do not know what and of what kind
they will turn out to be, so that you may avoid speaking of things which
you know quite well, and may not be bound by the consent you have given to
them. There are two letters of Theophilus,(1) a Synodal and a Paschal
letter, against Origen and his disciples, and others against Apollinarius
and against Origen also, which, within the last two years or thereabouts, I
have translated and given to the men who speak our language for the
edification of the church. I am not aware that I have translated anything
else of his. But, when you say that you assent to the opinion of the pope
Theophilus in everything, you must take care not to let your masters and
disciples hear you, and not to offend these numerous persons who call me a
robber and you a martyr, and also not to provoke the wrath of the man(2)
who wrote letters to you against the bishop Epiphanius, and exhorted you to
stand fast in the truth of the faith, and not to change your opinion for
any terror. This epistle in its complete form is held by those to whom it
was brought. After this you say, after your manner: "I will satisfy you
even when you rage against me, as I have in the matter you spoke of
before." But again you say, "What do you want? have you anything more at
which you may shoot with the bow of your oratory?" And yet you are
indignant if I find fault with your distasteful way I of speaking, though
you take up the lowest expressions of the Comedians, and in writing on
church affairs adopt language fit only for the characters of harlots and
their lovers on the stage.

   17. Now, as to the question which you raise, when it was that I began
to admit the authority of the pope Theophilus, and was associated with him
in community of belief. You make answer to yourself: "Then, I suppose, when
you were the supporter of Paul whom he bad condemned and made the greatest
effort to help him, and instigated him to recover through an imperial
rescript the bishopric from which he had been removed by the episcopal
tribunal." I will not begin by answering for myself, but first speak of the
injury which you have here done to another. What humanity or charity is
there in rejoicing over the misfortunes of others and in exhibiting their
wounds to the world? Is that the lessen you have learned from that
Samaritan who carried back the man that was half dead to the inn? Is this
what you understand by pouring oil into his wounds, and paying the host his
expenses? Is it thus that you interpret the sheep brought back to the fold,
the piece of money recovered, the prodigal son welcomed back? Suppose that
you had a right to speak evil of me, because I had injured you, and, to use
your words, had goaded you to madness and stimulated you to evil speaking:
what harm had a man who remains in obscurity done you, that you should lay
bare his scars, and when they were skinned over, should  tear them open by
inflicting this uncalled for  pain? Even if he was worthy of your re
preaches, were you justified in doing this? If I am not mistaken, those
whom you wish to strike at through him (and I speak the open opinion of
many) are the enemies of the Origenists; you use the troubles of one of
them to show your violence against both.(1) If the decisions of the pope
Theophilus so greatly please you, and you think it impious that an
episcopal decree should be nullified, what do you say about the rest of
those whom he has condemned? And what do you say about the pope Anastasius,
about whom you assert most truly that no one thinks him capable as the
bishop of so great a city, of doing an injury to an innocent or an absent
man? I do not say this because I set myself up as a judge of episcopal
decisions, or wish what they have determined to be rescinded; but I say,
Let each of them do what he thinks right at his own risk, it is for him
alone to consider how his judgment will be judged. Our duties in our
monastery are those of hospitality; we welcome all who come to us with the
smile of human friendliness. We must take care lest it should again happen
that Mary and Joseph do not find room in the inn, and that Jesus should be
shut out and say to us, "I was a stranger and ye took me not in." The only
persons we do not welcome are heretics, who are the only persons who are
welcomed by you: for our profession binds us to wash the feet of those who
come to us, not to discuss their merits. Bring to your remembrance, my
brother, how he whom we speak of had confessed Christ: think of that breast
which was gashed by the scourges: recall to mind the imprisonment he had
endured, the darkness, the exile, the work in the mines, and you will not
be surprised that we welcomed him as a passing guest. Are we to be thought
rebels by you because we give a cup of cold water to the thirsty in the
name of Christ?

   18. I can tell you of something which may make him still dearer to us,
though more odious to you. A short time ago, the faction of the heretics
which was scattered away from Egypt and Alexandria came to Jerusalem, and
wished to make common cause with him, so that as they suffered together,
they might have the same heresy imputed to them. But lie repelled their
advances, he scorned and cast them from him: he told them that he was not
an enemy of the faith and was not going to take up arms against the Church:
that his previous action had been the result of vexation not of unsoundness
in the faith; and that he had sought only to prove his own innocence, not
to attack that of others. You profess to consider an imperial rescript
upsetting an episcopal decree to be an impiety. That is a matter for the
responsibility of the man who obtained it. But what is your opinion of men
who, when they have been themselves condemned, haunt the palaces of the
great, and in a serried column make an attack on a single man who
represents the faith of Christ? However, as to my own communion with the
Pope Theophilus, I will call no other witness than the very man whom you
pretend that I injured.(1) His letters were always addressed to me, as you
well know, even at the time when yon prevented their being forwarded to me,
and when you used daily to send letter carriers to him repeating to him
with vehemence that his opponent was my most intimate friend, and telling
the same falsehoods which you now shamelessly write, so that you might stir
up his hatred against me and that his grief at the supposed injury done him
might issue in oppression against me in matters of faith. But he, being a
prudent man and a man of apostolical wisdom, came through time and
experience to understand both our loyalty to him and your plots against us.
If, as you declare, my followers stirred up a plot against you at Rome and
stole your uncorrected manuscripts while you were asleep; who was it that
stirred up the pope Theophilus against the public enemy in Egypt? Who
obtained the decrees of the princes against them, and the consent of the
whole of this quarter of the world? Yet you boast that you from your youth
were the hearer and disciple of Theophilus, although he, before he became a
bishop, through his native modesty, never taught in public, and you, after
he became a Bishop, were never at Alexandria. Yet you dare, in order to
deal a blow at me, to say " I do not accuse, or change, my masters." If
that were true it would in my opinion throw a grave suspicion on your
Christian standing. As for myself, you have no right to charge me with
condemning my former teachers: but I stand in awe of those words of
Isaiah:(1) " Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put
darkness for light and light for darkness, that call bitter sweet and sweet
bitter." But it is you who drink alike the honeywine of your masters and
their poisons, who have fallen away from your true master the Apostle, who
teaches that neither he himself or an angel, if they err in matters of
faith, must not be followed.

   19. You allude to Vigilantius. What dream this is that you have dreamed
about him I do not know. Where have I said that he was defiled by communion
with heretics at Alexandria? Tell me the book, produce the letter: but you
will find absolutely no such statement. Yet with your wonted carelessness
of statement or rather impudence of lying, which makes you imagine that
every one will believe what you say, you add: " When you quoted a text of
Scripture against him in so insulting a way that I do not dare to repeat it
with my own mouth." You do not dare to repeat it because you can make the
charge seem worse by keeping silence; and, because your accusation has no
facts to rest upon, you simulate modesty, so that the reader may imagine
that you are acting from consideration towards me, although your lies show
that you do not consider your own soul. What is this text of Scripture
which is too shameful to proceed out of that most shameless month of yours?
What shameful thing, indeed, can you mention in the sacred books? If you
are ashamed to speak, at any rate you can write it down, and then I shall
be convinced of wantonness by my own words. I might be silent on all other
points, and I should still prove by this single passage how brazen is your
effrontery. You know how little I fear your impeachment. If you produce the
evidence with which you threaten me, all the blame which now rests on you
will rest on me. I gave my reply to you when I dealt with Vigilantius; for
he brought the same charges against the which you bring first in the guise
of friendly eulogy, afterwards in that of hostile accusation. I am aware
who it was that stirred up his ravings against me; I know your plots and
vices; I am not ignorant of his simplicity which is proclaimed by every
one. Through his folly your hatred against me found an outlet for its fury;
and, if I wrote a letter to suppress it, so that you should not be thought
to be the only one who possesses a literary cudgel, that does not justify
you in inventing shameful expressions which you can find in no part of my
writings whatever. You must accept and confess the fact that the same
document which answered his madness aroused also your calumnies.

   20. In the matter of the letter of the pope Anastasius, you seem to
have come on a slippery place; you walk unsteadily, and do not see where to
plant your feet. At one moment you say that it must have been written by
me; at another that it ought to have been transmitted to you by him to whom
it was sent. Then again you charge the writer with injustice; or you
protest that it matters nothing to yon whether he wrote it or not, since
you hold his predecessor's testimonial, and, while Rome was begging you to
give her the honor of your presence, you disdained her through love of your
own little town. If you have any suspicion that the letter was forged by
me, why do you not ask for it in the chartulary of the Roman See and then,
when you discover that it was not written by the bishop, hold me manifestly
guilty of the crime? You would then instead of trying to bind me with
cobwebs, hold me fast bound in a net of strong cords. But if it is as
written by the Bishop of Rome, it is an act of folly on your part to ask
for a copy of the letter from one to whom it was not sent, and not from him
who sent it, and to send to the East for evidence the source of which you
have in your own country. You had better go to Rome and expostulate with
him as to the reproach which he has directed against you when you were both
absent and innocent. You might first point out that he had refused to
accept your exposition of faith, which, as you say, all Italy has approved,
and that he made no use of your literary cudgel against the dogs you spoke
of. Next, you might complain that he had sent to the East a letter aimed at
you which branded you with the mark of heresy, and said that by your
translation of Origen's books Peri` Archw^n the Roman church which had
received the work in its simplicity was in danger of losing the sincerity
of faith which it had learned from the Apostle; and that he had raised yet
more ill will against you by daring to condemn this very book, though it
was fortified by the attestation of your Preface. It is no light thing that
the pontiff of so great a city should have fastened this charge upon you or
have rashly taken it up when made by another. You should go about the
streets vociferating and crying over and over again, "It is not my book,
or, if it is, the uncorrected sheets were stolen by Eusebius. I published
it differently, indeed I did not publish it at all; I gave it to nobody, or
at all events to few; and my enemy was so unscrupulous and my friends so
negligent, that all the copies alike were falsified by him." This, my
dearest brother, is what you ought to have done, not to turn your back upon
him and to direct the arrows of your abuse across the sea against me; for
how can it cure your wounds that I should be wounded? Does it comfort a man
who is stricken for death to see his friend dying with him?

   21. You produce a letter of Siricius(1) who now sleeps in Christ, and
the letter of the living Anastasius you despise. What injury you ask, can
it do you that he should have written (or perhaps not written at all) when
you knew nothing of it? If he did write, still it is enough for you that
yon have the witness of the whole world in your favor, and that no one
thinks it possible that the bishop of so great a city could have done an
injury to an innocent man, or even to one who was simply absent. You speak
of yourself as innocent, though your translation made all Rome shudder; you
say you were absent, but it is only because you dare not reply when you are
accused. And you so shrink from the judgment of the city of Rome that you
prefer to subject yourself to an invasion of the barbarians(1) than to the
opinion of a peaceful city. Suppose that the letter of last year was forged
by me; who then wrote the letters which have lately been received in the
East? Yet in these last the pope Anastasius pays you such compliments that,
when you read them, you will be more inclined to set to work to defend
yourself than to accuse me.

   I should like you to consider how inevitable is the wisdom which you
are shunning and the Attic Salt and the eloquence of your diction in
religious writing. You are attacked by others, you are pierced through by
their condemnation, yet it is against me that you toss yourself about in
your fury, and say: " I could unfold a tale as to the manner of your
departure from Rome; as to the opinions expressed about you at the time,
and written about you afterwards, as to your oath, the place where you
embarked, the pious manner in which you avoided committing perjury; all
this I could enlarge upon, but I have determined to keep back more than I
relate." These are specimens of your pleasant speeches. And if after this I
say anything sharp in answer to you threaten me with immediate proscription
and with the sword. You are a most eloquent person, and have all the tricks
of rhetoric; you pretend to be passing over things which you really reveal,
so that what you cannot prove by an open charge, you may make into a crime
by seeming to put it aside. All this is your simplicity; this is what you
mean by sparing your friend and reserving your statements for the judicial
tribunal; you spare me by heaping up a mass of charge against me.

   22. If any one wishes to hear the arrangements for my journey from
Rome, they were these. In the month of August,(2) when the etesian winds
were blowing, accompanied by the reverend presbyter Vincentius and my young
brother, and other monks who are now living at Jerusalem, I went on board
ship at the port of Rome, choosing my own time, and with a very large body
of the saints attending me, I arrived at Rhegium. I stood for a while on
the shore of Scylla, and heard the old stories of the rapid voyage of the
versatile Ulysses, of the songs of the sirens and the insatiable whirlpool
of Charybdis. The inhabitants of that spot told me many tales, and gave me
the advice that I should sail not for the columns of Proteus but for the
port where Jonah landed, because the former of those was the course suited
for men who were hurried and flying, but the latter was best for a man who
was imprisoned; but I preferred to take the course by Malea and the
Cyclades to Cyprus. There I was received by the venerable bishop
Epiphanius, of whose testimony to you boast. I came to Antioch, where I
enjoyed the communion of Paulinius the pontiff and confessor and was set
forward by him on my journey to Jerusalem, which I entered in the middle of
winter and in severe cold. I saw there many wonderful things, and verified
by the judgment of my own eyes things which had before come to my ears by
report. Thence I made my way to Egypt. I saw the monasteries of Nitria, and
perceived the snakes(1) which lurked among the choirs of the monks. Then
making haste I at once returned to Bethlehem, which is now my home, and
there poured my perfume upon the manger and cradle of the Saviour. I saw
also the lake of ill-omen. Nor did I give myself to ease and inertness, but
I learned many things which I did not know before. As to what judgment was
formed of me at Rome, or what was written afterwards, you are quite welcome
to speak out, especially since you have writings to trust to; for I am not
to be tried by your words which you at your will either veil in enigma or
blurt out with open falsehood, but by the documents of the church. You may
see how little I am afraid of you. If you can produce against me a single
record of the Bishop of Rome or of any other church, I will confess myself
to be chargeable with all the iniquities which I find assigned to you. It
would be easy for me to tell of the circumstances of your departure, your
age, the date of sailing, the places in which you lived, the company you
kept. But far be it from me to do what I blame you for doing, and in a
discussion between churchmen, to make up a story worthy of the ravings of
quarrelling hags. Let this word be enough for your wisdom to remember. Do
not adopt a method with another which can at once be retorted on yourself.

   23. As regards our reverend friend Epiphanius, this is strange
shuffling of yours, when you say that it was impossible for him to have
written against you after his giving you the kiss and joining with you in
prayer. It is as if you were to contend that he would not be dead if a
short time before he had been alive, or as if it were not equally certain
that he had first reproved you and then, after the kiss of peace,
excommunicated you. "They went out from us," it is said,(1) "but they were
not of us; otherwise they would no doubt have continued with us." The
apostle bids us avoid a heretic after first and second admonition: of
course this implies that he was a member of the flock of the church before
he was avoided or condemned. I confess I cannot restrain my laughter when,
at the prompting of some clever person, you strike up a hymn in honour of
Epiphanius. Why, this is the 'silly old man,' the 'anthropomorphite,' this
is the man who boasted in your presence of the six thousand books of Origen
that he had read, who ' thinks himself entrusted with the preaching of the
Gospel against Origen among all nations in their own tongue who 'will not
let others read Origen for fear they should discover what he has stolen
from him.' Read what he has written, and the letter, or rather letters, one
of which I will adduce as a testimonial to your orthodoxy, so that it may
be seen how worthy he is of your present praise.(2) " May God set you free,
my brother, and the holy people of Christ which is entrusted to you, and
all the brethren who are with you, and especially the Presbyter Rufinus,
from the heresy of Origen, and all other heresies, and from the perdition
which they bring. For if many heresies have been condemned by the Church on
account of one word or of two, which are contrary to the faith, how much
more must that man be counted a heretic who has invented so many perverse
things, so many false doctrines! He stands forth as the enemy of God and of
the church." This is the testimony which this saintly man bears to you.
This is the garland of praise which he gives you to parade in. Thus runs
the letter which your golden coins extracted from the chamber of our
brother Eusebius, so that you might calumniate the translator of it, and
might fix upon me the guilt of a most manifest crime--that of rendering a
Greek word as 'dearest' which ought to have been 'honourable!' But what is
all this to  you who can control all events by your prudent methods, and
can trim your path between different possibilities, first saying, if you
can find any one to believe you, that neither Anastasius nor Epiphanius
ever wrote a line against you; and, secondly, when their actual letters cry
out against you, and break down your audacious effrontery, despising the
judgment of them both, and say it does not matter to you whether they wrote
or not, since it was impossible for them to write against an innocent and
an absent man.

   Then again, you have no right to speak evil of that saintly man, as you
do when you say " that it may be seen that he gave me peace with his words
and his kiss, but kept evil and deceit in his heart"--for this is your
reasoning, and it is thus that you defend yourself. That this is the letter
of Epiphanius and that it is hostile to you, all the world knows: and that
it came in its genuine form into your haads we can prove; and it is
therefore an astounding shame or rather utter shamelessness in you to deny
what you cannot doubt to be true. What! Is Epiphanius to be befouled with
the imputation that he gave you the sign of peace but had deceit in his
heart? Is it not much truer to believe that he first admonished you because
he wished to save you from error and bring you back to the right way; and
that therefore he did not reject your Judas kiss, wishing to break down by
his forbearance the betrayer of the faith,--but that afterwards when he
found that all his toil was fruitless, and that the leopard could not
change its spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, he proclaimed in his letter
what had before been only a suspicion in his mind?

   24. It is somewhat the same argument which you use against the pope
Anastasius, namely, that, since you hold the letters of the bishop
Siricius, it was impossible that he should write against you. I am afraid
you suspect that some injury has been done you. I cannot understand how a
man of your acuteness and capacity can condescend to such nonsense; you
suppose that your readers are foolish, but you shew that you are foolish
yourself. Then after this extraordinary argumentation, you subjoin this
little sentence: " Far be such conduct from these reverend persons. It is
from your school that such actions proceed. You gave us all the  signs of
peace at our departure, and then threw missiles charged with venom from
behind our backs." In this clause or rather declamatory speech, you
intended, no doubt, to I shew your rhetorical skill. It is true we gave you
the signs of peace, but not to embrace heresy; we joined hands, we
accompanied you as you set forth on your journey, on the understanding that
you were catholic not that we were heretical. But I want to learn what
these poisoned missiles are which you complain that I threw from behind
your back. I sent the presbyters, Vincentius, Paulinianus, Eusebius,
Rufinus. Of these, Vincentius went to Rome long before you Paulinianus and
Eusebius set out a year after you had sailed; Rufinus two years after, for
the cause of Claudius; all of them either for private reasons, or because
another was in peril of his life. Was it possible for me to know that when
you entered Rome, a nobleman had dreamed that a ship full of merchandise
was entering with full blown sails? or that all questions about fate were
being solved by a solution which should not itself be fatuous? or that you
were translating the book of Eusebius as if it were Pamphilus'? or that you
were putting your own cover upon Origen's poisoned dish by lending your
majestic eloquence to this translation of his notorious work Peri` Archw^n?
This is a new way of calumniating a man. We sent out the accusers before
you had committed the crime. It was not, I repeat, it was not by our plan,
but by the providence of God, that these men, who were sent out for another
reason, came to fight against the rising heresy. They were sent, like
Joseph, to relieve the coming famine by the fervour of their faith.

   25. To what point will not audacity burst forth when once it is freed
from restraints? He has imputed to himself the charge made against another
so that we may be thought to have invented it. I made a charge against some
one unnamed, and he takes it as spoken against himself; he purges himself
from another man's sins, being only sure of his own innocence. For he takes
his oath that he did not write the letter that passed under my name to the
African bishops, in which I am made to confess that I had been induced by
Jewish influence to make false translations of the Scriptures; and he sends
me writings which contain all these things which he declares to be unknown
to him. It is remarkable to know how his  subtlety has coincided with
another man's malice, so that the lies which this other told in Africa, he
in accord with him declared to be true; and also how that elegant style of
his could be imitated by some chance and unskilled person. You alone have
the privilege of translating the venom of the heretics, and of making all
nations drink a draught From the cup of Babylon. You may correct the Latin
Scriptures from the Greek. and may deliver to the Churches to read
something different from what they received from the Apostles; but I am not
to be allowed to go behind the Septuagint version which I translated after
strict correction for the men of my native tongue a great many years ago,
and, for the confutation of the Jews, to translate the actual copies of the
Scriptures which they confess to be the truest, so that when a dispute
arises between them and the Christians, they may have no place of retreat
and subterfuge, but may be smitten most effectually with their own spear. I
have written pretty fully on this point if I rightly remember, in many
other places, especially in the end of my second book; and I have checked
your popularity-hunting, with which you seek to arouse ill will against me
among the innocent and the inexperienced, by a clear statement of fact. To
that I think it enough to refer the reader.

   26. I think it a point which should not be passed over, that you have
no right to complain that the falsifier of your papers. holds in my esteem
the glorious position of a confessor, since you who are guilty of this very
crime are called a martyr and all apostle by all the partisans of Origen,
for that exile and imprisonment of yours at Alexandria. On your alleged
inexperience in Latin composition I have answered you above. But, since you
repeat the same things, and, as if forgetful of your former defence, again
remind me that I ought to know that you have been occupied for thirty years
in devouring Greek books, and therefore do not know Latin, I would have you
observe that it is not a few words of yours with which I find fault, though
indeed all your writing is worthy of being destroyed. What I wished to do
was to shew your followers, whom you have taken so much pains in teaching
to know nothing, to understand what amount of modesty there is in a man who
teaches what he does not know, who writes what he is ignorant of, so that
they may expect to find the same wisdom in his opinions. As to what you add
" That it is not faults of words which are offensive, but sins, such as
lying, calumny, disparagement, false witness, and all evil speaking, and
that the mouth which speaketh lies kills the soul," and your deprecation,
"Let not that ill-savour reach my nostrils;" I would believe what you say,
were it not that I discover facts inconsistent with this. It is as if a
fuller or a tanner in speaking to a dealer in pigments should warn him that
he had better hold his nose as he passed their shops. I will do what you
recommend; I will stop my nose, so that it may not be put to the torture by
the delightful odour of your truth-speaking and your benedictions.

   27. In reference to your alternate praise and disparagement of me, you
argue with great acuteness that you have the same right to speak good and
evil of me that I have to find fault with Origen and Didymus whom I once
praised. I must instruct you, then,  wisest of men and chief of Roman
dialecticians, that there is no fault of logic in praising a than in
certain respects while you blame him in others, bat only in approving and
disapproving one and the same thing. I will take all example, so that,
though you may not understand, the wise reader may join me in understanding
the point. In the case of Tertullian we praise his great talent. but we
condemn his heresy. In that of Origen we admire his knowledge of the
Scriptures, but nevertheless we do not accept his false doctrine. As to
Didymus, however, we extol both his powers of memory, and the purity of his
faith in the Trinity, while on the other point in which he erred in
trusting to Origen we withdraw from him. The vices of our teachers are not
to be imitated, their virtues are. There was a man at Rome who had an
African, a very learned man, as his grammar teacher; and he thought that he
was rising to an equality with his teacher because he copied his strident
voice and his faulty pronunciation. You in your Preface to the Peri`
Archw^n speak of me as your brother and call me your most eloquent
colleague, and proclaim my soundness in the faith. From these three points
you cannot draw back; carp at me on all other points as you please, so long
as you do not openly contradict this testimony which you bear to me; for in
calling me friend and colleague, you confess me worthy of your friendship;
when you proclaim me an eloquent man, you cannot go on accusing me of
ignorance; and when you confess that I am in all points a catholic, you
cannot fix on me the guilt of heresy. Beyond these three points you may
charge me with anything you like without openly contradicting yourself.
From all this calculation the net result is that you are wrong in blaming
in me what you formerly praised; but that I am not in fault when, in the
case of the same men, I praise what is laudable and blame what is
censurable.

   28. You pass on to the origin of souls, and at great length exclaim
against the smoke which you say I raise. You want to be allowed to express
ignorance on a point on which you advisedly dissemble your knowledge; and
therefore begin questioning me about angels and archangels; as to the mode
of their existence, the place and nature of their abodes, the differences,
if there be any, existing between them; and then as to the course of the
sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, the character and movements of the
stars. I wonder that you did not set down the whole of the lines:(1)

Whence come the earthquakes, whence the high swoll'n seas

Breaking their bounds, then sinking back to rest;

The Sun's eclipse, the labours of the moon;

The race of men and beasts, the storm, the fire,

Arcturus' rainy Hyads, and the Bears:

Why haste the winter's suns to bathe themselves

Beneath the wave, what stays its lingering nights.

   Then, leaving things in heaven, and condescending to those on earth,
you philosophize on minor points. You say: " Tell us what are the causes of
the fountains, and of the wind; what makes the hail and the showers; why
the sea is salt, the rivers sweet; what account is to be given of clouds
and storms, thunderbolts, and thunder and lightning." You mean that if do
not know all this, you are entitled to say you know nothing about the
origin of souls. You wish to balance your ignorance on a single point by
mine on many. But do not you, who in page after page stir up what you call
my smoke, understand that I can see your mists and whirlwinds? You wish to
be thought a than of extensive knowledge, and among the disciples of
Calpurnius(2) to enjoy a great reputation for wisdom, and therefore you
raise up tile whole physical world in front of me, as if Socrates had said
in vain when he passed over to the study of Ethics: " What is above us is
nothing to us." So then, if I cannot tell you why the ant, which is such a
little creature, whose body is a mere point, has six feet, whereas an
elephant with its vast bulk has only four to walk on; why serpents and
snakes glide along on their chests and bellies; why the worm which is
commonly called the millipede has such a swarming array of feet; I am
prohibited from knowing anything about the origin of souls! You ask me what
I know about souls, so that, when I make any statement about them, you may
at once attack it. And if I say that the church's doctrine is that God
forms souls every day, and sends them into the bodies of those who are
born, you will at once bring out the snares your master invented, and ask,
Where is God's justice if he grants souls to those who are born of adultery
or incest? Is he not an accessory to men's sins, if he creates souls for
the adulterers who make the bodies? as if, when you hear that seed corn had
been stolen, you are to suppose the fault to lie in the nature of the corn,
and not in the man who stole the wheat; and that therefore the earth had no
business to nourish the seed in its bosom, because the hands of the sower
who cast them in were unclean. Hence comes also your mysterious question,
Why do infants die? since it is because of their sins, as you. hold, that
they received bodies. There exists a treatise of Didymus addressed to you,
in which he meets this inquiry of yours, with the answer, that they had not
sinned much, and therefore it was enough punishment for them just to have
touched their bodily prisons. He, who was your master and mine also, when
you asked this question, wrote at my request three books of comments on the
prophet Hosea, and dedicated them to me. This shows what parts of his
teaching we respectively accepted.

   29. You press me to give my opinions about the nature of things. If
there were room, I could repeat to you the views of Lucretius who follows
Epicurus, or those of Aristotle as taught by the Peripatetics, or of Plato
and Zeno by the Academics and the Stoics. Passing to the church, where we
have the rule of truth, the books of Genesis and the Prophets anti
Ecclesiastes, give us much information on questions of this kind. But if we
profess ignorance about all these things, as also about the origin of
souls, you ought in your Apology to acknowledge your ignorance of all
alike, and to ask your calumniators why they had the impudence to force you
to reply on this single point when they themselves know nothing of all
those great matters. But Oh! how vast was the wealth contained in that
trireme(1) which had come full of all the wares of Egypt and the East to
enrich the poverty of the city of Rome.

(2) "Thou art that hero, well-nam'd Maximus,

  Thou who alone by writing sav'st the state."

   Unless you had come from the East, that very learned man would be still
sticking fast among the mathematici,(3) and all Christians would still be
ignorant of what might be said against fatalism. You have a right to ply me
with questions about astrology and the cause of the sky and the stars, when
you brought to land a ship full of such wares as these. I acknowledge my
poverty; I have not grown rich to this extent in the East like you. You
learned in your long sojourn under the shadow of the Pharos what Rome never
knew: Egypt instructed you in lore which Italy did not possess till now.

   30. Your Apology says that there are three opinions as to the origin of
souls: one held by Origen, a second by Tertullian and Lactantius (as to
Lactantius what you say is manifestly false), a third by us simple and
foolish men, who do not see that, if our opinion is true, God is thereby
shewn to be unjust. After this you say that you do not know what is the
truth. I say, then, tell me, whether you think that outside of these three
opinions any truth can be found so that all these three may be false; or
whether you think one of these three is true. If there is some other
possibility, why do you confine the liberty of discussion within a close-
drawn line? and why do you put forward the views which are false and keep
silence about the true? But if one of the three is true and the two others
false, why do you include false and true in one assertion of ignorance?
Perhaps you pretend not to know which is true in order that it may be safe
for you, whenever you may please, to defend the false. This is the smoke,
these are the mists, with which you try to keep away the light from men's
eyes. You are the Aristippus(1) of our day: you bring your ship into the
port of Rome full of merchandize of all kinds; you set your professorial
chair on high, and represent to us Hermagoras(2) and Gorgias(3) of
Leontinum: only, you  were in such a hurry to set sail that you left one
little piece of goods, one little question, forgotten in the East. And you
cry out with reiteration that you learned both at Aquileia and at
Alexandria that God is the creator of both our bodies and our souls. This
then, forsooth, is the pressing question, whether our souls were created by
God or by the devil, and not whether the opinion of Origen is true that our
souls existed before our bodies and committed some sin because of which
they have been tied to these gross bodies; or whether, again, they slept
like dormice in a state of torpor and of slumber. Every one is asking this
question, but you say nothing about it; nobody asks the other, but to that
you direct your answer.

   31. Another part of my 'smoke' which you frequently laugh at is my
pretence, as you say, to know what I do not know, and the parade I make of
great teachers to deceive the common and ignorant people. You, of course,
are a man not of smoke but of flame, or rather of lightning; you fulminate
when you speak; you cannot contain the flames which have been conceived
within your mouth, and like Barchochebas,(1) the leader of the revolt of
the Jews, who used to hold in his month a lighted straw and blow it out so
as to appear to be breathing forth flame: so you also, like a second
Salmoneus,(2) brighten the whole path on which you tread, and reproach us
as mere men of smoke, to whom perhaps the words might be applied,(3)"Thou
touchest the hills and they smoke." You do not understand the allusion of
the Prophet(4) when he speaks of the smoke of the locusts; it is no doubt
the beauty of your eyes which makes it impossible for you to bear the
pungency of our smoke.

   32. As to your charge of perjury, since you refer me to your book; and
since I have made my reply to you and Calpurnius(5) in the previous books,
it will be sufficient here to observe that you exact from me in my sleep
what you have never yourself fulfilled in your waking hours. It seems that
I am guilty of a great crime because I have told girls and virgins of
Christ, that they had better not read secular works, and that I once
promised when warned in a dream not to read them. But your ship which was
announced by revelation to the city of Rome, promises one thing and effects
another. It came to do away with the puzzle of the mathematici: what it
does is to do away with the faith of Christians. It had made its run with
sails full set over the Ionian and AEgean, the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian
seas, only to make shipwreck in the Roman port. Are you not ashamed of
hunting up nonsense of this kind and putting me to the trouble of bringing
up similar things against you? Suppose that some one had seen a dream about
you such as might make you vainglorious; it would have been modest as well
as wise in you not to seem to know of it, instead of boasting of other
people's dreams as a serious testimony to yourself. What a difference there
is between your dream and mine! Mine tells how I was humbled and repressed;
yours boasts over and over again how you were praised. You cannot say, It
matters nothing to me what another man dreamed, for in those most
enlightening books of yours you tell us that this was the motive which led
you to make the translation; you could not bear that an eminent man should
have dreamed in vain. This is all your endeavour. If you can make me out
guilty of perjury, you think you will be deemed no heretic.

   33. I now come to the most serious charge of all, that in which you
accuse me of having been unfaithful after the restoration of our
friendship. I confess that, of all the reproaches which you bring against
me or threaten me with, there is none which I would so much deprecate as
that of fraud, deceit and breach of faith. To sin is human, to lay snares
is diabolical. What! Was it for this that I joined hands with you over the
slain lamb in the Church of the Resurrection, that I might 'steal your
manuscripts at Rome'? or that I might 'send out my dogs to gnaw away your
papers before they were corrected'? Can any one believe that we made ready
the accusers before you had committed the crime? Is it supposed that we
knew what plans you were meditating in your heart? or what another man had
been dreaming? or how the Greek proverb was having its fulfilment in your
case, "the pig teaches Minerva"? If I sent Eusebius to bark against you,
who then stirred up the passion of Aterbius and others against you? Is it
not the fact that he thought that I also was a heretic because of my
friendship with you? And, when I had given him satisfaction as to the
heresies of Origen, you shut yourself up at home, and never dared to meet
him, for fear you should have to condemn what you wished not to condemn, or
by openly resisting him should subject yourself to the reproach of heresy.
Do you think that be cannot be called as a witness against you because he
is your accuser? Before ever the reverend bishop Epiphanius came to
Jerusalem, and gave you the signs of peace by word and kiss, 'yet having
evil thoughts and guile in his heart'; before I translated for him that
letter(1) which was such a reproof to you, and in which he wrote you down a
heretic though he had before approved you as orthodox; Aterbius was barking
against you at Jerusalem, and, if he had not speedily taken himself off,
would have felt not your literary cudgel but the stick you flourish in your
right hand to drive the dogs away.(2)

   34. "But why," you ask, "did you accept my manuscripts which had been
falsified? and why, when I had translated the Peri` Archw^n did you dare to
put your pen to the same work? If I had erred, as any man may, ought you
not to summon me to reply by a private letter, and to speak smoothly to me,
as I am speaking smoothly in my present letter?" My whole fault is this
that, when accusations were brought against me in the guise of disingenuous
praise, I tried to purge myself from them, and this without invidiously
introducing your name. I wished to refer to many persons a charge which you
alone had brought, not so as to retort the charge of heresy upon you, but
to repel it from myself. Could I know that you would be angry if I wrote
against the heretics? You had said that you had taken away the heretical
passages from the works of Origen. I therefore turned my attacks not upon
you but upon the heretics, for I did not believe that you were a favourer
of heresy. Pardon me, if I did this with too great vehemence. I thought
that I should give you pleasure. You say that it was by the dishonest
tricks of those who acted for me that your manuscripts were brought out
before the public, when they were kept secretly in your chamber, or were in
possession only of the man who had desired to have the translation made for
him. But how is this reconcilable with your former statement that either no
one or very few had them? If they were kept secret in your chamber, how
could they be in the possession of the man who had desired to have the
translation made for him? If the one man for whom the manuscripts had been
written had obtained them in order to conceal them, then they were not kept
secret in your chamber, and they were not in the hands of those few who, as
you now declare, possessed them. You accuse us of having stolen them away;
and then again you reproach us with having bought them for a great sum Of
money and an immense bribe. In a single matter, and in one little letter,
what a tissue of various and discordant falsehoods! You have full liberty
for accusation, but I have none for defence. When you bring a charge, you
think nothing about friendship. When I begin to reply, then your mind is
fall of the rights of friendship. Let me ask you: Did you write these
manuscripts for concealment or for publication? If for concealment, why
were they written? If for publication, why did you conceal them?

   35. But my fault, you will say, was this, that I did not restrain your
accusers who were my friends. Why, I had enough to do to answer their
accusations against myself; for they charged me with hypocrisy,(1) as I
could shew by producing their letters, because I kept silence when I knew
you to be a heretic; and because by incautiously maintaining peace with
you, I fostered the intestine wars of the Church. You call them my
disciples; they suspect me of being your fellow-disciple; and, because I
was somewhat sparing in my rejection of your praises, they think me to be
initiated, along with you, into the mysteries of heresy. This was the
service your Prologue did me; you injured me more by appearing as my friend
than you would had you shewn yourself my enemy. They had persuaded
themselves once for all (whether rightly or wrongly is their business) that
you were a heretic. If I should determine to defend you, I should only
succeed in getting myself accused by them along with you. They cast in my
teeth your laudation of me, which they suppose to have been written not in
craft but sincerity; and they vehemently reproach me with the very things
which you always praised in me. What am I to do? To turn my disciples into
my accusers for your sake? To receive on my own head the weapons which were
hurled against my friend?

   36. In the matter of the books Peri` Archw^n, I have even a claim upon
your gratitude. You say that you cut off anything that was offensive and
replaced it by what was better. I have represented things just as they
stood in the Greek. By this means both things are made to appear, your
faith and the heresy of him whom you translated. The leading Christians of
Rome wrote to me: Answer your accuser; if you keep silence, you will be
held to have assented to his charges. All of them unanimously demanded that
I should bring to light the subtle errors of Origen, and make known the
poison of the heretics to the ears of the Romans to put them on their
guard. How can this be an injury to you? Have you a monopoly of the
translation of these books? Are there no others who take part in this work?
When you translated parts of the Septuagint, did you mean to prohibit all
others from translating it after your version had been published? Why, I
also have translated many books from the Greek. You have full power to make
a second translation of them at your pleasure; for both the good and the
bad in them must be laid to the charge of their author. And this would hold
in your case also, had you not said that you had cut out the heretical
parts and translated only what was positively good. This is a difficulty
which you have made for yourself, and which cannot be solved, except by
confessing that you have erred as all men err, and condemning your former
opinion.

   37. But what defence can you make in reference to the Apology which you
have written for the works of Origen, or rather in reference to the book of
Eusebius, though you, have altered much, and translated the work of a
heretic under the title of a martyr. yet you have set down still more which
is incompatible with the faith of the church. You as well as I turn Latin
books into Greek; can you prohibit me from giving the works of a foreigner
to my own people? If I had made my answer in the case of some other work of
yours in which you had not attacked me, it might have been thought that, in
translating what you had already translated, I was acting in hostility to
you, and wishing to prove you inaccurate or untrustworthy. But this is a
new kind of complaint, when you take it amiss that an answer is made you on
a point on which you have accused me. All Rome was said to have been upset
by your translation; every one was demanding of me a remedy for this; not
that I was of any account, but that those who asked this thought me so. You
say that you who had made the translation were my friend. But what would
you have had me do? Ought we to obey God or man? To guard our master's
property or to conceal the theft of a fellow-servant? Can I not be at peace
with you unless I join with you in committing acts which bring reproach? If
you had not mentioned my name, if you had not tricked me out in your
flatteries, I might have had some way of escape, and have made many excuses
for not translating what had already been translated. But you, my friend,
have compelled me to waste a good many days on this work, and to bring out
before the public eye what should have been engulfed in Charybdis; yet
still, though I had been injured, I observed the laws of friendship, and as
far as possible defended myself without accusing you. It is a too
suspicious and complaining temper which you shew when you take home to
yourself as a reproach what was spoken against the heretics. If it is
impossible to be your friend unless I am the friend of heretics, I shall
more easily put up with your enmity than with their friendship.

   38. You imagine that I have contrived yet another piece of falsehood,
namely, that I have composed a letter to you in my own name, pretending
that it was written long ago, in which I make myself appear kindly and
courteous; but which you never received. The truth can easily be
ascertained. Many persons at Rome have had copies of this letter for the
last three years; but they refused to send it to you knowing that you were
throwing out insinuations against my reputation, and making up stories of
the most shameful kind and unworthy of our Christian profession. I wrote in
ignorance of all this, as to a friend; but they would not transmit the
letter to an enemy, such as they knew you to be, thus sparing me the
effects of my mistakes and you the reproaches of your conscience. You next
bring arguments to shew that, if I had written such a letter, I had no
right to write another con-raining many reproaches against you. But here is
the error which pervades all that you say, and of which I have a right to
complain; whatever I say against the heretics you imagine to be said
against you. What! Am I refusing you bread because I give the heretics a
stone to crush their brains? But, in order to justify your disbelief in my
letter, you are obliged to make out that of pope Anastasius rests upon a
similar fraud.  On this point I have answered you before. If you really
suspect that it is not his writing, you have the means of convicting me of
the forgery. But if it is his writing, as his letters of the present year
also written against you prove, you will in vain use your false reasonings
to prove my letter false, since I can shew from his genuine letter that
mine also is genuine.

   39. In order to parry the charge of falsehood, it is your humour to
become quite exacting. You are not to be called to produce the six thousand
books of Origen, of which you speak; but you expect me to be acquainted
with all the records of Pythagoras. What truth is there in all the boastful
language, which you blurted out from your inflated cheeks, declaring that
you had corrected the Peri` Archw^n by introducing words which you had read
in other books of Origen, and thus had not put in other men's words but
restored his own? Out of all this forest of his works you cannot produce a
single bush or sucker. You accuse me of raising up smoke and mist. Here you
have smoke and mist indeed. You know that I have dissipated and done away
with them; but, though your neck is broken, you do not bow it down, but,
with an impudence which exceeds even your ignorance, you say that I am
denying what is quite evident, so as to excuse yourself, after promising
mountains of gold. for not producing even a leatherlike farthing from your
treasury. I acknowledge that your animosity against me rests on good
grounds, and that your rage and passion is genuine; for, unless I made
persistent demands for what does not exist, you would be thought to have
what you have not. You ask me for the books of Pythagoras. But who has
informed you that any books of his are extant? It is true that in my letter
which you criticize these words occur: "Suppose that I erred in youth, and
that, having been trained in profane literature, I at the beginning of my
Christian course had no sufficient doctrinal knowledge, and that I
attributed to the Apostles things which I had read in Pythagoras or Plato
or Empedocles;" but I was speaking not of their books but of their tenets,
with which I was able to acquaint myself through Cicero, Brutus, and
Seneca. Read the short oration for(1) Vatinius, and others in which mention
is made of secret societies. Turn over Cicero's dialogues. Search through
the coast of Italy which used to be called Magna Graecia, and you will find
there various doctrines of Pythagoras inscribed on brass on their public
monuments. Whose are those Golden Rules? They are Pythagoras's; and in
these all his principles are contained in a summary form. Iamblicus(2)
wrote a commentary upon them, following in this, at least partly, Moderatus
a man of great eloquence, and Archippus and Lysides who were disciples of
Pythagoras. Of these, Archippus and Lysides held schools in Greece, that
is, in Thebes; they retained so fully the precepts of their teacher, that
they made use of their memory instead of books. One of these precepts is:
"We must cast away by any contrivance, and cut out by fire and sword and
contrivances of all kinds, disease from the body, ignorance from the soul,
luxury from the belly, sedition from the state, discord from the family,
excess from all things alike."(3) There are other precepts of Pythagoras,
such as these. "Friends have all things in common." "A friend is a second
self." "Two moments are specially to be observed, morning and evening: that
is, things which we are going to do, and things which we have done." "Next
to God we must worship truth, for this alone makes men akin to God." There
are also enigmas which Aristotle has collated with much diligence in his
works: "Never go beyond the Stater," that is, "Do not transgress the rule
of justice; " "Never stir the fire with the  sword," that is, "Do not
provoke a man  when he is angry and excited with hard words." "We must not
touch the crown," that is "We must maintain the laws of the state." "Do not
eat out your heart," that is, "Cast away sorrow from your mind." "When you
have started, do not returns" that is, "After death do not regret this
life." "Do not walk on the public road," that is, "Do not follow the errors
of the multitude." "Never admit a swallow into the family," that is, "Do
not admit chatterers and talkative persons under the same roof with you."
"Put fresh burdens on the burdened; put  none on those who lay them down;"
that is, "When men are on the road to virtue, ply them with fresh precepts;
when they abandon themselves to idleness, leave them alone." I said I had
read the doctrines of the Pythagoreans. Let me tell you that Pythagoras was
the first to discover the immortality of the soul and its transmigration
from one body to another. To this view Virgil gives his adherence in the
sixth book of the Aeneid in these words:(1)

These, when the wheel full thousand years has turned,

God calls, a long sad line, in Lethe's stream

To drown the past, and long once more to see

The skies above, and to the flesh return.

   40. Pythagoras taught, accordingly, that he had himself been originally
Euphorbus, and then Callides, thirdly Hermotimus, fourthly Pyrrhus, and
lastly Pythagoras; and that those things which had existed, after certain
revolutions of time, came into being again; so that nothing in the world
should be thought of as new. He said that true philosophy was a meditation
on death; that its daily struggle was to draw forth the soul from the
prison of the body into liberty: that our learning was recollection, and
many other things which Plato works out in his dialogues, especially in the
Phaedo and Timaeus. For Plato, after having formed the Academy and gained
innumerable disciples, felt that his philosophy was deficient on many
points, and therefore went to Magna Graecia, and there learned the
doctrines of Pythagoras from Archytas of Tarentum and Timaeus of Locris:
and this system he embodied in the elegant form and style which he had
learned from Socrates. The whole of this, as we can prove, Origen carried
over into his book Peri` Archw^n, only changing the name. What mistake,
then, was I making, when I said that in my youth I had imputed to the
Apostles ideas which I had found in Pythagoras, Plato and Empedocles? I did
not speak, as you calumniously pretend, of what I had read in the books of
Pythagoras, Plato and Empedocles, but of what I had read as having existed
in their writings, that is, what other men's writings shewed me to have
existed in them. This mode of speaking is quite common. I might say, for
instance "The opinions which I read in Socrates I believed to be true,"
meaning what I read as his opinions in Plato and others of the Socratic
school, though Socrates himself wrote no books. So I might say, I wished to
imitate the deeds which I had read of in Alexander and Scipio,(1) not
meaning that they described their own deeds, but that I had read in other
men's works of the deeds which I admired as done by them. Therefore, though
I may not be able to inform you of any records of Pythagoras himself as
being extant, and proved by the attestation of his son or daughter or
others of his disciples, yet you cannot hold me guilty of falsehood,
because I said not that I had read his books, but his doctrines. You are
quite mistaken if you thought to make this a screen for your falsehood, and
to maintain that because I cannot produce any book written by Pythagoras,
you have a right to assert that six thousand books of Origen have been
lost.

   41. I come now to your Epilogue, (that is to the revilings which you
pour upon me,) in which you exhort me to repentance, and threaten me with
destruction unless I am converted, that is, unless I keep silence under
your accusations. And this scandal, you say, will recoil upon my own head,
because it is I who by replying have provoked you to the madness of writing
when yon are a man of extreme gentleness and of a meekness worthy of Moses.
You declare that you are aware of crimes which I confessed to you alone
when you were my most intimate friend, and that yon will bring these before
the public; that I shall be painted in my own colours; and that I ought to
remember that I am lying at your feet, otherwise you might cut off my head
with the sword of your mouth. And, after many such thing, in which you toss
yourself about like a madman, you draw yourself up and say that you wish
for peace, but still with the intimation that I am to keep quiet for the
future, that is that I am not to write against the heretics, nor to answer
any accusation made by you; if I do this, I shall be your good brother and
colleague, and a most eloquent person, and your friend and companion; and,
what is still more, you will pronounce all the translations  I have  made
from Origen to be orthodox.  But, if I titter a word or move a step, I
shall at once be unsound and a heretic, and unworthy of all connexion with
you. This is the way you trumpet forth my praises, this is the way you
exhort me to peace. You do not grant me liberty for a groan or a tear in my
grief.

   42. It would be possible for me also to paint you in your own colours,
and to meet your insanity with a similar rage; to say what I know and add
what I do not know; and with a license like yours, or rather fury and
madness, to keep up things false and true alike, till I was ashamed to
speak and you to hear: and to upbraid you in such a way as would condemn
either the accused or the accuser; to force myself on the reader by mere
effrontery, make him believe that what I wrote unscrupulously I wrote
truly. But far be it from the practice of Christians while offering up
their lives to seek the life of others, and to become homicides not with
the sword but the will. This may agree with your gentleness and innocence;
for you can draw forth from the dung heap within your breast alike the
odour of roses and the stench of corpses; and, contrary to the precept of
the Prophet, call that bitter which once you had praised as sweet. But it
is not necessary for us, in treating of Christian topics, to throw out
accusations which ought to be brought before the law courts. You shall hear
nothing more from me than the vulgar saying: "When you have said what you
like, you shall bear  what you do not like." Or if the coarse proverb seems
to you too vulgar, and, being a man of culture, you prefer the words of
philosophers or poets, take from me the words of Homer.(1)

"What words thou speakest, thou the like shalt hear."

   One thing I should like to learn from one of such eminent sanctity and
fastidiousness, (whose holiness is such that in the presence of your very
handkerchiefs and aprons the devils cry out); whom do you take for your
model in your writings? Has any one of the catholic writers, in a
controversy of opinions, imputed moral offences to the man with whom he is
arguing? Have your masters taught you to do this? Is this the system in
which you have been trained, that, when you cannot answer a man, you should
take off his head? that when you cannot silence a man's tongue, you should
cut it out? You have nothing much to boast of, for you are doing only what
the scorpions and cantharides do. This is what Fulvia(2) did to Cicero and
Herodias to John. They could not bear to hear the truth, and therefore they
pierced the tongue that spoke truth with the pin that parted their hair.
The duty of dogs is to bark in their masters' service; why may I not bark
in the service of Christ? Many have written against Marcion or Valentinus,
Arius or Eunomius. By which of them was any accusation brought of immoral
conduct? Did they not in each case bring their whole effort to bear upon
the refutation of the heresy? It is the machination of the heretics, that
is of your masters, when convicted of betrayal of the faith, to betake
themselves to evil speaking. So Eustathius(1) the Bishop of Antioch was
made into a father unawares. So Athanasius Bishop of Alexandria cut off a
third hand of Arsenius; for, when he appeared(2) alive after having been
supposed to be dead, he was found to have two. Such things also now are
falsely charged against the Bishop of the same church, and the true faith
is assailed by gold, which constitutes the power of yourself and your
friends. But I need pot speak of controversy with heretics, who, though
they are really without, yet call themselves Christians. How many of our
writers have contended with those most impious men, Celsus and Porphyry!
but which of them has left the cause he was engaged in to busy himself with
the imputation of crime to his adversary, such as ought to be set down not
in church-writings but in the calendar of the judge? For what advantage
have you gained if you establish a man's criminality but tail in your
argument? It is quite unnecessary that in bringing an accusation you should
risk your own head. If your object is revenge, you can hire an executioner,
and satisfy your desire. You pretend to dread a scandal, and yet you are
ready to kill a man who was once your brother, whom you now accuse, and
whom you always treat as an enemy. Yet I wonder how a man like you, who
knows what he is about, should be so blinded by madness as to wish to
confer a benefit upon me by drawing forth my soul out of prison,(3) and
should not suffer it to remain with you in the darkness of this world.

   43. If you wish me to keep silence, cease from accusing me. Lily down
your sword, and I will throw away my shield. To one thing only I cannot
consent; that is, to spare the heretics, and not to vindicate my orthodoxy.
If that is the cause of discord between us, I can submit to death, but not
to silence. It would have been right to go through the whole of the
Scriptures for answers to your ravings, and, like David playing on his
harp, to take the divine words to calm your raging breast. But I will
content myself with a few statements from a single hook; I will oppose
Wisdom to folly; for I hope if you despise the words of men you will not
think lightly of the word of God. Listen, then, to that which Solomon the
wise says about you and all who are addicted to evil speaking and
contumely:

   "Foolish men, while they desire injuries, become impious and hate
wisdom.(1) Devise not evil against thy friend. Be not angry with a man
without a cause. The impious exalt contumely.(2) Remove from thee the evil
mouth, keep far from thee the wicked lips, the eyes of him that speaketh
evil, the tongue of the unjust, the hands which shed the blood of the
just,(3) the heart that deviseth evil thoughts, and the feet which hasten
to do evil. He that resteth upon falsehood feedeth the winds, and followeth
the flying birds. For he hath left the ways of his own vineyard, and hath
made the wheels of his tillage to err. He walketh through the dry and
desert places, and with his hands he gathereth barrenness.(4) The mouth of
the froward is near to destruction, and(5) he who uttereth evil words is
the chief of fools. Every simple man is a soul that is blessed; but a
violent man is dis-honourable.(6) By the fault of his lips the sinner
falleth into a snare.(7) All the ways of a fool are right in his own
eyes.(8) The fool showeth his anger on that very day.(9) Lying lips are an
abomination to the Lord.(10) He that keepeth his lips guardeth his own
soul; but he that is rash with his lips shall be a terror to himself.(11)
The evil man in his violence doeth evil things, and the fool spreadeth out
his folly.(12) Seek for wisdom among the evil and thou shall not find
it.(13) The rash man shall eat of the fruit of his own ways.(14) The wise
man by taking heed avoideth the evil; but the fool is confident, and joins
himself to it.(15) A long-suffering man is strong in his wisdom; the man of
little mind is very unwise.(15) He who oppresseth the poor reproacheth his
Maker.(17) The tongue of the wise knoweth good things, but the mouth of
fools speaketh evil.(18) A quarrelsome man preferreth strife, and every one
that lifteth up his heart is unclean before God.(19) Though hand join with
hand unjustly, they shall not be unpunished.(20) He that loveth life must
be sparing to his mouth.(21) Insolence goeth before bruising, and evil
thoughts before a fall.(22) He who closeth his eyes speaketh perverse
things, and provoketh all evil with his lips.(23) The lips of a fool lead
him into evil, and the foolhardy speech calleth down death. The man of evil
counsel shall suffer much loss.(24) Better is a poor man who is just than a
rich man that speaketh lies.(25) It is a glory to a man to turn away from
evil words; but he that is foolish bindeth'himself therewith.(26) Love not
detraction, lest thou be rooted out.(1) The bread of lying is sweet to a
man, but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel.(2) He that
gaineth treasures with a lying tongue followeth vanity, and shall come into
the snares of death.(3) Say thou nought in the ear of a fool, lest haply
the wise mock at thy words.(4) The bludgeon and the sword and the arrow are
hurtful things;(5) so is the man who beareth false witness against his
friend.(6) As the birds and the sparrows fly away, so the curse shall be
vain and shall not overtake him.(7) Answer not an unwise man according to
his lack of wisdom, lest thou become like unto him; but answer a fool
according to his folly, lest he appear to himself to be wise.(8) He who
layeth wait for his friends when he is discovered saith, I did it in
sport.(9) A faggot for the coals, and wood for the fire, and a man of evil
words for the tumult of strife.(10) If thine enemy ask thee aught,
sparingly but with a loud voice,(11) consent thou not to him, for there are
seven degrees of wickedness in his heart.(12) The stone is heavy, and the
sand hard to be borne; but the anger of a fool is heavier than either;
indignation is cruel, anger is sharp, and envy is impatient.(13) The
impious man speaketh against the poor; and he that trusteth in the audacity
of his heart is most foolish.(14) The unwise man putteth forth all his
anger, but the wise dealeth it out in parts.(15) An evil son--his teeth are
swords, and his grinders are as harrows, to consume the weak from off the
earth, and the poor from among men."

   Such are the lessons in which I have been trained and therefore I was
unwilling to return bite for bite, and to attack you by way  of
retaliation; and I thought it better to exorcise the madness of one who was
raving, and to pour in the antidote of a single book into his poisoned
breast. But I fear I shall have no success, and that I shall be compelled
to sing the song of David, and to take his words for my only
consolation:(1)

   "The wicked are estranged from the womb, they go astray even from the
belly. They have spoken lies. Their madness is like the madness of the
serpent; like the deaf adder which stoppeth her ears, which will not hear
the voice of the charmers, and of the magician wisely enchanting. God shall
break their teeth in their mouth; the Lord shall break the great teeth of
the lions. They shall come to nothing, like water that runneth away. He
bendeth his bow until they be brought low. Like wax that melteth, they
shall be carried away; the fire hath fallen upon them and they have not
seen the sun."

   And again:(2)

   "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance upon the
impious; he shall wash his hands in the blood of the sinner. And man shall
say, Verily, there is a reward for the righteous; verily, there is a God
that judgeth those that are on the earth."

   44. In the end of your letter you say: "I hope that you love peace." To
this I will answer in a few words: If you desire peace, lay down your arms.
I can be at peace with one who shews kindness; I do not fear one who
threatens me. Let us be at one in  faith, and peace will follow
immediately.


Taken from "The Early Church Fathers and Other Works" originally published
by Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. in English in Edinburgh, Scotland, beginning in
1867. (LNPF II/III, Schaff and Wace). The digital version is by The
Electronic
Bible Society, P.O. Box 701356, Dallas, TX 75370, 214-407-WORD.

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