RUFINUS' APOLOGY, BOOK II
RUFINUS' APOLOGY.
BOOK II.
1. Jerome says that the defenders of Origen are united in a federation of
perjury.
2. Jerome's commentaries on Ephesians follow Origen's interpretation of
the texts about a secret federation to whom higher truths are to be told.
3. But I follow Christ in condemning all falsehood.
4. Jerome has not only allowed perjury but has practised it.
5. His treatise on Virginity (Ep. xxii to Eustochium) defames all orders
of Christians.
6. In his anti-Ciceronian dream he promised never to read or possess
heathen books.
7. Yet his works are filled with quotations from them.
8. In his "Best mode of Translation" he relies on the opinions of Cicero
and Horace.
9. He confesses his obligations to Porphyry.
8 (2). Jerome at Bethlehem had heathen books copied and taught them to
boys.
9 (2.). He condemns as heathenish unobjectionable views which he himself
holds.
10 (2). He spoke of Paula impiously as the mother-in-law of God.
11. Such impiety is unpardonable.
12. Jerome's boast of his teachers, Didymus and the Jew Baranina.
13. His extravagant praises of Origen.
14. Preface to Origen on Canticles.
15. Preface to Commentary on Micah.
16. Book of Hebrew Names.
17. A story of Origen.
18. Pamphilus the Martyr and his Library.
19. Jerome praises Origen but condemns others for doing the same.
20. Jerome praises the dogmatic as well as the expository works of Origen.
21. Contrast of Jerome's earlier and later attitude towards Origen.
22. The Book of Hebrew Questions.
23. Jerome's attack upon Ambrose.
24. Preface to Didymus on the Holy Spirit.
25. Jerome attacks one Christian writer after another.
26. His treatment of Melania.
27. I never followed Jerome's errors, for which he should do penance.
27 a. But I followed his method of translation.
28. Jerome in condemning me condemns himself.
29. He says I shew Origen to be heretical, yet condemns me.
30. His pretence that the Apology for Origen is not by Pamphilus needs no
answer.
31. Others did not translate the <greek>Peri</greek> A<greek>rkpn</greek>
because they did not know Greek.
32. Jerome's translation of the Scriptures impugned.
33. Authority of the LXX.
34. Has the Church had spurious Scriptures?
35. Danger of altering the Versions of Scripture.
36. Origen's Hexapla--Its object.
37. St. Paul's method of dealing with erring brethren.
38. How Jerome should have replied to Pammachius.
39. The Books against Jovinian.
40. My translation of the <greek>Peri</greek> A<greek>rkpn</greek> was
meant to aid in a good cause.
41, 42, 43. Recapitulation of the Apology.
44. An appeal to Pammachius.
45, 46. Why my translations of Origen had created offence, but Jerome's
not. 47. A Synod, if called on to condemn Origen, must condemn Jerome also.
In the first book of my Apology I have dealt and a very grave accusation,
which has, like with the accusations of dogmatic error which he endeavours
unjustly to fix upon others, and truth. It is this. He says[1] that certain have,
by producing his own testimony, persons have joined themselves to Origen turned
them back against him. In the in a secret society of perjury, and that the
second book, I shall be able, now that I forms of initiation are to be found in the
have settled and put aside the matters which have to do with controversies of
faith, more confidently to reply to him on the other heads of his accusation.
For there is another Sixth hook of his Miscellanies:[2] and that this mystery
has been detected by no one but himself through all this space o time. I should
only excite his ridicule were I to declare, even with an oath, that I was an
entire stranger to such a secret society of perjury. The road by which I propose
to reach the declaration of the truth is more direct: it is by proving, which I
can do quite easily, that I have never possessed those books nor borrowed them
from others to read. Not only cannot I defend myself from an accusation the
meaning of which I do not know, but I do not see how a matter can be made the
subject of a charge against me as to which I do not even know what it is, or
whether it exists at all. I only know that my accuser declares that either Origen
wrote or his disciples hold, that, when the Scripture says "He that speaketh truth
with his neighbour" the words apply to a neighbour only in the sense of one of
the initiated, a member of this secret society: and again that the Apostle's
words "We speak wisdom among them that are perfect" and the words of Christ
"Give not that which is holy unto dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine,"
imply that truth is not to be communicated to all.
2. Let us see what my adversary himself says on this point in those
Commentaries which he has selected. In the second book. in commenting on the words[1]
"Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth to his neighbour, for we
are members one of another" (after a short introduction) he speaks as follows:
"Hence Paul himself, who was one of the perfect, says in another Epistle
"We speak wisdom among them that are perfect."[2] This then is what is
commanded, that those mystic and secret things, which are full of divine truth, should
be spoken by each man to his neighhour, so that day unto day may utter speech
and night to night shew knowledge,[3] that is, that a man should show all those
clear and lucid truths which he knows to those to whom the words can be worthily
addressed: "Ye are the light of the world."[4] On the other hand, he should
exhibit everything involved in darkness and wrapped up in the mist of symbols to
others who are themselves nothing but mist and darkness, those of whom it is
said "And there was darkness under his feet,"[5] that is, of course, under the
feet of God. For on Mount Sinai Moses enters into the whirlwind and the mist
where God was; and it is written of God, "He has made darkness his secret
place."[6] Let each man then thus speak truth in a mystery to his neighbour, and not
give that which is holy to dogs nor cast his pearls before swine;[7] but those who
are anointed with the oil of truth them let him lead into the bridechamber of
the spouse, into the inner sanctuary of the King."
Observe, I beg you, look carefully and see whether in all this passage
there is any one else but himself on whom the condemnation can fall. If his
adversaries were looking for an opportunity of convicting and destroying him on
the ground of what he has written, what other course could they take, and what
other testimonies could they wish to produce against him than these which he
produces against himself as if he were pleading against another? If it were
sought to pronounce a condemnation against him, his own letter would suffice. You
have only to change the name; the test of the accusation suits no one but himself
alone. What he calls on us on the one hand to condemn, he exhorts us on the
other hand to follow: what he asserts, that he reproves: what he hates, that he
does. How happy must be his disciples who obey and imitate him!
3. He has endeavoured, indeed, to brand us with the stain of this false
teaching by speaking to some of our brethren, and he repeats this by various
letters, according to his recognized plan of action. It is nothing to me what he
may write or assert, but, since he raises this question about a doctrine of
perjury, I will state my opinion upon it, and then leave him to pass judgment upon
himself. It is this. Since our Lord and Saviour says in the Gospels "It was said
to them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt pay to the
Lord thy vows, but I say unto you, Swear not at all;"[1] I say that every one who
teaches that for any cause whatever we may swear falsely, is alien from the
faith of Christ and from the unity of the catholic church.
4. But I should like, now that I have satisfied you on my own account, and
supported my opinion by an anathema, to make this plain to you further, that
he himself declares that in certain orgies and mystical societies to which he
belongs perjury is practised by the votaries and associates. That is a certain
and most true saying of our God, "By their fruits ye shall know them,"[2] and
this also "A tree is known by its fruits."[3] Well: he says that I have accepted
this doctrine of perjury. If then I have been trained to this practice, and this
evil tree has indeed its roots within me, it is impossible but that
corresponding fruits should have grown upon me, and also that I should have gathered some
society of mystic associates around me. As regards myself whom alone he seeks
to injure by all that he writes, I will not bear witness to myself, nor will I
say that there are cases of necessity in which it is right to swear: for I wish
to avoid reproach through timidity if not through prudence; and, at all
events, if I fail in obedience to the command, I will acknowledge my error. I will
therefore make no boast of this. But, whether I have erred or acted prudently, he
at all events can lay his finger on no act of mine by which he can convict me.
But I can shew froth his writings, that he not only holds this doctrine of
perjury, but practises this foul vice as a sacred duty. I will bring nothing
against him which has been trumped up by ill will, as he does against the; but I
will produce him and his writings as witnesses against himself, so that it may be
made clear that it is not his enemies who accuse but he who convicts himself.
5. When he was living at Rome he wrote[1] a treatise on tim preservation
of virginity, which all the pagans and enemies of God, all apostates and
persecutors, and whoever else hate the Christian name, vied with one another in
copying out, because of the infamous charges and foul reproaches which it contained
against all orders and degrees among us, against all who profess and call
themselves Christians, in a word, against the universal church; and also because this
man declared that the crimes imputed to us by the Gentiles, which were before
supposed to be false were really true, and indeed that much worse things were
done by our people than those laid to their charge. First, he defames the
virgins themselves of whose virtue he professed to be writing, speaking of them in
these words:[2]
"Some of them change their dress and wear the costume of men, and are
ashamed of the sex in which they were born; they cut their hair short, and raise
their heads with the shameless stare of eunuchs. There are some who put on
Cilician jackets,[3] and with hoods made up into shape, make themselves like horned
owls and night birds, as if they were becoming babies again."
There are a thousand such calumnies, and worse than these, in the book. He
does not even spare widows, for he says of them,[4] "They care for nothing but
the belly and what is next it;" and he adds many other obscene remarks of this
kind. As to the whole race of Solitaries, it would take too long to give the
passages written by him in which he attacks them with the foulest abuse. It
would be a shame even to recount the indecent attacks which he makes upon the
Presbyters and the deacons. I will, however, give the beginning of this violent
invective, by which you may easily imagine what a point he reaches in its later
stages.[1]
"There are some," he says, "of my own order, who only seek the office of
Presbyter or deacon so that they may have more license to visit women. They care
for nothing but to be well dressed, to be well scented, to prevent their feet
from being loose and bulging. Their curly hair bears the mark of the crisping
iron; their fingers sparkle with rings; and they walk on tiptoe, for fear a
fleck of mud from the road should touch their feet. When you see them, you would
take them for bridegrooms rather than clerics."
He then goes on to hurl his reproaches against our priests and ministers,
specifying their faults, or rather their crimes; and to represent the access
allowed them to married ladies not only in a disgraceful light, but so as to seem
positively execrable: and after having cut to pieces with his satirical
defamation the whole race of Christians, he does not even spare himself, as you shall
presently hear.
6. For I will now return, after a sort of digression, to the point I had
proposed, and for the sake of which it was necessary to mention this treatise. I
will shew that perjury is looked upon by him as lawful, to such a point that
he does not care for its being detected in his writings. In this same treatise
he admonishes the reader that it is wrong to study secular literature, and
says,[2] "What has Horace to do with the Psaltery, or Virgil with the Gospels, or
Cicero with St. Paul? Will not your brother be offended if he sees you sitting at
meat in that idol's temple?" And then, after more of the same kind, in which
he declares that a Christian must have nothing to do with the study of secular
literature, he gives an account of a revelation divinely made to him and filled
with fearful threatenings upon the subject. He reports that, after he had
renounced the world, and had turned to God, he nevertheless was held in a tight grip
by his love of secular books, and found it hard to put away his longing for
them.[3]
Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment
seat of the Judge; and here the light was so bright, and those who stood around
were so radiant, that I cast myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up.
Asked who and what I was I replied 'I am a Christian.' But He who presided
said: 'Thou liest; thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For where thy
treasure is there will thy heart be also.' Instantly I became dumb, and amid the
strokes of the lash--for He had ordered me to be scourged--I was tortured more
severely still by. the fire of conscience, considering with myself that verse
'In the grave, who shall give thee thanks?' Yet for all that I began to cry and
to bewail myself saying: 'Have mercy upon me, O Lord; have mercy upon me.'
Amid the sound of the scourges this cry still made itself heard. At last the
bystanders, failing down before the knees of Him who presided, prayed that He would
have pity on my youth, and that He would give me space to repent of my error.
He might still, they urged, inflict torture upon me, should I ever again read
the works of the Gentiles. Under the stress of that awful moment I should have
been ready to make even still larger promises than these. Accordingly I made oath
and called upon His name, saying 'Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books,
or if ever again I read such, I have denied thee.' On taking this oath, I was
dismissed, and returned to the upper world.
7. You observe how new and terrible a form of oath this is which he
describes. The Lord Jesus Christ sits on the tribunal as judge, the angels are
assessors, and plead. for him; and there, in the intervals of scourgings and
tortures, he swears that he will never again have by him the works of heathen authors
nor read them. Now look back over the work we are dealing with, and tell me
whether there is a single page of it in which he does not again declare himself a
Ciceronian, or in which he does not speak of 'our Tully,' 'our Flaccus,' 'our
Maro.'[1] As to Chrysippus and Aristides, Empedocles and all the rest of the
Greek writers, he scatters their names around him like a vapour or halo, so as to
impress his readers with a sense of his learning and literary attainments.
Amongst the rest, he boasts of having read the books of Pythagoras. Many learned
men, indeed, declare these books to be non-extant: but he, in order that he may
illustrate every part of his vow about heathen authors, declares that he has read
even those which do not exist in writing. In almost all his works he sets out
many, more and longer quotations from these whom he calls 'his own' than from
the Prophets and Apostles who are ours. Even in the works which he addresses to
girls and weak women, who desire, as is right, only to be edified by teaching
out of our Scriptures, he weaves in illustrations from 'his own' Flaccus and
Tullius and Maro.
8. Take the treatise which[2] he entitles "On the best mode of
translating," though there is nothing in it except the addition of the title which is of
the best, for all is of the worst; and in which he proves those to be heretics
with whom he is now in communion, thus incurring the condemnation of our Apostle
(not his, for those whom he calls 'his' are Flaccus and Tully) who says. "He
who judges[1] is condemned if he eat." In that treatise, which tells us that no
works of any kind reasonably admit of a rendering word for word (though he has
come round now to think such rendering reasonable)[2] he inserts whole
passages from a work of Cicero.[3] But had he not said, "What has Horace to do with
the Psalter, or Maro with the Gospels, or Cicero with the Apostle? Will not your
brother be offended if he sees you sitting in that idol temple?" Here of course
he brings himself in guilty of idolatry; for if reading causes offence, much
more does writing. But, since one who turns to idolatry does not thereby become
wholly and completely a heathen unless he first denies Christ, he tells us that
he said to Christ, as he sat on the judgment seat with his most exalted angel
ministers around him, "If I ever hereafter read or possess any heathen books, I
have denied thee," and now he not only reads them and possesses them, not only
copies them and collates them, but inserts them among the words of Scripture
itself, and in discourses intended for the edification of the Church. What I say
is well enough known to all who read his treatises, and requires no proof. But
it is just like a man who is trying to save himself from such a gulf of
sacrilege and perjury, to make up some excuse for himself, and to say, as he does: "I
do not now read them, I have a tenacious memory, so that I can quote various
passages from different writers without a break, and I now merely quote what I
learned in my youth." Well: if some one were to ask me to prove that before the
sun rose this morning there was night over the earth, or that at sunset the sun
had been shining all day, I should answer that, if a man doubted about what
all men knew, it was his business to shew cause for his doubts, not for me to
shew cause for my certainty. Still in this instance, where a man's soul is at
stake, and the crime of perjury and of impious denial of Christ is alleged, a
condemnation must not be thought to be a thing of course, even though the facts are
known and understood by all men. We are not to imitate him who condemns the
accused before they have undergone any examination; and not only without a
hearing, but without summoning them to appear; and not only unsummoned, .but when they
are already dead; and not only the dead, but those whom he had always praised,
till then; and not only those whom he had praised, but whom he had followed
and had taken as his masters. We must fear the judgment of the Lord, who says'
"Judge not and ye shall not be judged," and again, "With what measure ye mete it
shall be measured to you again." Therefore, though it is really superfluous, I
will bring against him a single witness, but one who must prevail, and whom he
cannot challenge, that is, once more, himself and his own writings. All can
attest what I say in reference to this treatise of his and my assertion about it
seems to be superfluous; but I must make use of some special testimony, lest
what I say should seem unsatisfactory to those who have not read his works.
9. When he wrote his treatises against Jovinian, and some one had raised
objections to them, he was informed of these objections by Domnio, that old man
whose memory we all revere; and in his answer to him[2] he said that it was
impossible that a man like him should be in the wrong, since his knowledge
extended to everything that could be known: and he proceeded to enumerate the various
kinds of syllogisms, and the whole art of learning and of writing (of course
supposing that the man who found fault with him knew nothing about such things).
He then goes on tires:[3]
"It was foolish, it appears, in me to think that I could not know all
these things without the philosophers, and to look upon the end of the stylus which
strikes out and corrects as better than the end with which we write. It was
useless for me it seems, to have translated[4] the Commentaries of Alexander, and
for my learned master to have brought me into the knowledge of Logic through
the 'Introduction' of Porphyry; and, putting aside humanistic teachers, there
was no reason why I should have had Gregory Nazianzen and Didymus as my teachers
in the Scriptures."
This, you observe, is the man who said to Christ, I have denied thee if
ever I am found to possess or to read the works of the heathen. He might, one
would think, at all events have left out Porphyry, who was Christ's special enemy,
who endeavoured as far as in him lay to completely subvert the Christian
religion, but whom he now glories in having had as his instructor in his
Introduction to Logic. He cannot put in the plea that he had learned these things at a
former time: for, before his conversion, he anti I equally were wholly ignorant of
the Greek language and literature. All these things came after his oath, after
that solemn engagement had been made. It is of no use for us to argue in such
a case. It will at once be said to us: Man, you are wrong, God is not mocked,
and no syllogisms spun out of the books of Alexander will avail with him. I
think, my brother, it was an ill-omened event that you submitted to the
Introduction of Porphyry. Into what has that faithless man introduced you? If it is into
the place where he is now, that is the place where there is weeping and gnashing
of teeth; for there dwell the apostate and the enemies of God; and perhaps the
perjurers will go there too.
10. You chose a bad introducer. If you will take my counsel, both you and
I will by preference turn to him who introduces us to the Father and who
said[1] 'No man cometh unto the Father but by me.' I lament for you, my brother, if
you believe this; and if you believe it not, I still lament that you hunt
through all sorts of ancient and antiquated documents for grounds for suspecting
other men of perjury, while perjury, lasting and endless with all its inexplicable
impiety, remains upon your own lips. Might not these words of the Apostle be
rightly applied to you:[2] "Thou that art called a Jew and restest in the law,
and makest thy boast in God, being instructed out of the law, and trustest that
thou thyself art a leader of the blind, a light of them that sit in darkness, an
instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, who hast a form of knowledge
and of the truth in the law: Thou therefore, that teachest others, teachest thou
not thyself? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou
commit adultery? Thou that preachest that a man should not steal, dost thou steal?
Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege"--that is perjury? And,
what comes last and most important, "The name of God is blasphemed among the
Gentiles through you," and your love of strife.
8 (2). We will pass on to clear up another of the charges, if only he will
confess under the stress of his own consciousness of wrong that he has been
convicted both of perjury and of making a false defence. Otherwise, if he
attempts to deny what I say, I can produce as witnesses any number of my brethren,
who, while living in the cells built by me on the Mount of Olives, copied out for
him most of the Dialogues of Cicero. I often, as they wrote them out, had in my
hands quaternions[1] of these Dialogues; and I looked them over myself, in
recognition of the fact that he gave them much larger pay than is usually given
for writings of other sorts. He himself also came to see me at Jerusalem from
Bethlehem, bringing with him a book which contained a single Dialogue of Cicero,
and also one of Plato's in Greek; he will not pretend to deny having given me
that book, and having stayed some thee with me. But what is the use of delaying
so long over a matter which is clearer than the light? To all that I have said
this addition is to be made, after which all further comment is superfluous;
that after he had settled in the monastery at Bethlehem, and indeed not so long
ago, he took the office of a teacher in grammar, and explained 'his own' Maro and
the comedians and lyrical and historical writers to young boys who had been
entrusted to him that he might teach them the fear of the Lord: so that he
actually became a teacher and professor in the knowledge of those heathen authors, as
to whom he had sworn that if he even read them he would have denied Christ.
9 (2). But now let us look at the other points which he blames. He says
that the doctrines in question are of heathen origin, but in this judgment he
condemns himself. He calls these doctrines heathenish; yet he himself incorporates
them into his works. He here makes a mistake. Still, we ought to stretch out
the hand to him, and not to press him too far: for it is only because he soars
so completely above the world on the wings of his eloquence, and is borne along
by the full tide of invective and vituperation: that he forgets himself and his
reason loses its place. Do not be so rash, my brother, as to condemn yourself
unnecessarily. Neither you nor Origen are at once to be set down among the
heathen if, as you have yourself said, you have written these things to vindicate
the justice of God, and to make answer to those who say that everything is
moved by chance or by fate: if, I say, it is from your wish to show that God's
providence which governs all things is just that you have said the causes of
inequality have been acquired by each soul through the passions and feelings of the
former life which it had in heaven; or even if you said that it is in
accordance with the character of the Trinity, which is good and simple and unchangeable
that every creature should in the end of all things be restored to the state in
which it was first created; and that this must be after long punishment equal
to the length of all the ages, which God inflicts on each creature in the
spirit not of one who is angry but of one who corrects, since he is not one who is
extreme to mark iniquity; and that, his design like a physician being to heal
men, he will place a term upon their punishment. Whether in this you spoke truly,
let God judge; anyhow such views seem to me to contain little of impiety
against God, and nothing at all of heathenism, especially if they were put forward
with the desire and intention of finding some means by which the justice of God
might be vindicated.
10 (2). I would not, therefore, have you distress yourself overmuch about
these points, nor expose yourself needlessly either to penance or to
condemnation. But there is a matter of real importance, as to which I can neither excuse
nor defend you; namely, a statement openly made by yon which is not only
heathenish but beyond all heathenism and impiety the statement in the treatise which
I have mentioned above,[1] that God has a mother-in-law. Has anything so
profane as this or so impious been said even by any of the heathen poets? It would be
a foolish question to ask whether you find anything of the kind in the holy
Scriptures. I only ask whether 'your' Flaccus or Maro, whether Plautus or
Terence, or even whether any writer of Satires among all their unclean and immodest
sayings has ever uttered such an outrage against God. No doubt you were led
astray by the fact that the girl to whom you addressed the treatise[2] was called
the bride of Christ: and hence you thought that her mother according to the flesh
might be called the mother-in-law of God. You did not recollect that such
things are said not according to the order of the flesh, but according to the grace
of the spirit. For a woman is called the bride of Christ because the word of
God is united in a kind of mystic wedlock with the human soul. But if the mother
of the girl in question is related to Christ by this spiritual connexion, she
herself should be called the bride of Christ, not the mother-in-law of God. As
it is, you might as well go on to call the father of the girl God's
father-in-law, and her sister his sister-in-law, or to call the girl herself God's
daughter-in-law. The fact is, you were so anxious to appear completely possessed of
the eloquence of Plautus or of Cicero, that you forgot that the Apostle speaks of
the whole church, parents and children, mothers and daughters, brothers and
sisters, all together, as one virgin or bride, when he says, '"I determined this
very thing, to present you as a chaste virgin to one man, which is Christ." But
you boast that you follow not Paul's but Porphyry's Introduction, and, since
he wrote his impious and sacrilegious books against Christ and against God, you
have fallen, through his introduction, into this abyss of blasphemy.
11. If, then, you really intend to do an act of repentance for those evil
speeches of yours, if you are not merely mocking us by saying this, and if you
are not in your heart such a lover of strife and contention that you are
willing even to defame yourself on this sole condition that you may be able thereby
to besmirch another; if it is not in pretence but in good faith that you repent
of what you have said amiss, come and do penance for this great and foul
blasphemy; for it is indeed blasphemy against God. For if a man oversteps the mark by
speaking erroneously of mere creatures, this is not such a very execrable
crime, especially if he does it, as you say, not with a set purpose of blasphemy,
but in seeking to vindicate the justice of God. But to lift up your mouth
against the heaven is a grave offence; to speak violence and blasphemy against the
Most High is worthy of death. Let us bestow our lamentations upon that which is
hard to cure; for what man is there who has the jaundice,[2] and is in danger
both of looks and life, who will complain loudly because of a little hangnail on
his foot or because a scratch made with his own finger which easily yields to
remedies, is not yet cured?
12. I think very little, indeed, of one reproach which he levels against
me, and think it hardly worthy of a reply; that, namely, in which, in recounting
the various teachers whom he hired, as he says, from the Jewish synagogue, he
says, in order to give me a sharp prick, "I have not been my own teacher, like
some people," meaning me of course, for he brings the whole weight of his
invective to bear against me from beginning to end. Indeed, I wonder that he should
have chosen to make a point of this, when he had a greater and easier matter at
hand by which to disparage me, namely this, that, though I stayed long among
many eminent teachers, yet I have nothing to show which is worthy of their
teaching or their training. He indeed, has not in his whole life stayed more than
thirty days at Alexandria where Didymus lived; yet almost all through his books
he boasts, at length and at large, that he was the pupil of Didymus the seer,
that he had Didymus as his initiator,[1] that is, his preceptor in the holy
Scriptures; and the material for all this boasting was acquired in a single month.
But I, for the sake of God's work, stayed six years, and again after an interval
for two more, where Didymus lived, of whom alone you boast, and where others
lived who were in no way inferior to him, but whom you did not know even by
sight, Serapion and Menites, men who are like brothers in life and character and
learning; and Paul the old man, who had been the pupil of Peter the Martyr; and,
to come to the teachers of the desert, on whom I attended frequently and
earnestly, Macarius the disciple of Anthony, and the other Macarius, and Isidore and
Pambas, all of them friends of God, who taught me those things which they
themselves were learning from God. What material for boasting should I have from all
these men, if boasting were seemly or expedient! But the truth is, I blush
even while I weave together these past experiences, which I do with the intention,
not of showing you, as you put it, that my masters did not do justice to my
talents, but, what I grieve over far more, that my talents have not done justice
to my masters.
But it is foolish in me to enumerate these holy Christian men. It is not
of them that be is thinking when be says that he has not like me been his own
teacher. It is of Barabbas[2] whom, unlike me, he took as his teacher from the
Synagogue, and of Porphyry by whose introduction he and not I had his
introduction into Logic. Pardon me for this that I have preferred to be thought of as an
unskilled and unlearned man rather than to be called the disciple of Barabbas.
For, when Christ and Barabbas were offered for our choice, I in my simplicity
made choice of Christ. You, it appears, are willing to join your shouts with
those who say,[3]"Not this man but Barabbas." And I should like to know what
Porphyry, that friend of yours who wrote his blasphemous books against our religion,
taught you? What good did you get from either of those masters of whom you
boast so much, the one drawing his inspiration from the idols which represent
demons, the other, as you tell us, from the Synagogue of Satan. Nothing, as far as I
see, but what they knew themselves. From Porphyry you gained the art of
speaking evil of Christians. to strike at those who live in virginity and continence,
at our deacons and presbyters, and to defame in your published writings, every
order and degree of Christians. From that other friend of yours, Barabbas,
whom you chose out of the synagogue rather than Christ, you learned to hope for a
resurrection not in power but in frailty, to love the letter which kills and
hate the spirit which gives life, and other more secret things, which, if
occasion so require, shall afterwards in due thee be brought to light.
13. But why should I prolong this discussion? I shall take no notice of
his reproaches and railings; I shall make no answer to his violent attacks, that
daily task of his, for which Porphyry sharpened his pen. For I have chosen
Jesus, not Barabbas, for my master, and he has taught me to be silent when reviled.
I will come to the point where I will shew how much truth there is in the
excuses for himself and the accusations against me which he has heaped together. He
says[1] that it is only in two short Prefaces that he ever was known to have
praised Origen; and that his praise extended only to his work as an interpreter
of Scripture, in which nothing is said of doctrine or of the faith, and that in
those parts of his works which he has himself translated there is absolutely
nothing advanced of the kind which he now reproves in the interest of the
Synagogue rather than that of the edification of Christians. It ought, one would
think, be enough to put him to silence, that those very things which he set forth
in his own books he blames in those of others; nevertheless, let us see how far
these other assertions of his are true. In the Preface[2] to the commentaries
of Origen on Ezekiel, contained in fourteen homilies or short orations, he
writes thus to one Vincentius:
"It is a great thing which you ask of me, my friend. that I should
translate Origen into Latin, and present to the ears of Romans a man of whom we may
say in the words of Didymus the seer, that he was a teacher of the churches
second only to the Apostles."
And a little way on he adds:
"I will briefly state for your information that Origen's works on the
whole of Scripture are of three kinds. First come the Extracts or Notes, called in
Greek Scholia, in which he shortly and summarily touches upon the things which
seemed to him obscure or to present some difficulty. The second kind is the
Hormiletics, of which the present commentary is a specimen. The third kind is what
he called Tomes, or as we say Volumes. In this part of his work he gives all
the sails of his genius to the breathing winds; and, drawing off from the land,
he sails away into mid ocean. I know that you wish that I should translate his
writings of all kinds. I have before mentioned the reason why this is
impossible; but I promise. you this, that if, through your prayers, Jesus gives me back
my health, I intend to translate, I will not say all, for that would be rash,
but very many of them; on this condition, however, which I have often set you,
that I should provide the words and you the secretary."
14. Take, again, the Preface to the Song of Songs:
"To the most holy Pope Damasus. Origen in his other books has surpassed
all' other men: in the Song of Songs he has surpassed himself. The work consists
of eleven complete volumes, and reaches a length of nearly twenty thousand
lines. In these he discusses first the version of the Septuagint; then those of
Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and last of all a Fifth Version which he states
that he discovered on the coast of Actium, and this he does so grandly and so
freely that it seems to me as if the words were fulfilled in him which
say,[1]"The king has brought me into his bedchamber." It would require a vast amount of
thee, of labour, and of money to translate a work so great and of so much
merit into the Latin language. I therefore leave it unattempted; and have merely
translated, and that without elegance, but correctly, these two Tracts which he
composed in ordinary language for babes and sucklings. I give you a mere taste
of his opinions, not a full meal; but enough to make you realize what is the
worth of his greater works, when the smaller give you so much pleasure."
15. Also in the Preface of his Commentary on Micah, which was written to
Paula and Eustochium, he says, after some few remarks:
"As to what they say, that it is not right for me to rifle the works of
Origen, and thereby to defile the writings of the ancients, they think this a
telling piece of abuse; but it is, in my opinion, the highest praise, since I am
seeking to imitate those who are approved not only by us, but by all thoughtful
men."
16. Again, in the Preface to his book on the meaning of Hebrew names, he
says, some way down:
"For fear that, when the edifice has been completed, the last touch, so to
speak, should be wanting, I have explained the words and names of the New
Testament, partly through a wish to follow the step's of Origen, whom all but the
ignorant acknowledge to have been the greatest teacher of the churches next to
the Apostles. Among the rest of the illustrious monuments of his genius is the
labour which he has bestowed upon this, desiring to complete as a Christian what
Philo as a Jew had left undone,"
17. Once more, in his letter to Marcella he says:[1]
"Ambrose, who supplied the paper, the money and the secretaries by the aid
of which our Adamantius[2] and Chalcenterus[3] completed his innumerable
books, in a certain letter written to the same person from Athens, declares that he
never had a meal, when Origen was present, without something being read, and
that he never went to bed without having some brother read aloud from the holy
Scriptures. This he said he continued day and night, so that prayer waited upon
reading and reading upon prayer."
18. Lastly, take the following from another letter to Marcella:
"The blessed Martyr Pamphilus, whose life Eusebius the Bishop of Caesarea
set forth in some three volumes, wished to rival Demetrius Phalereus and
Pisistratus, in his zeal to establish a library of sacred books: he sought out all
through the world representative works of great minds, which are their true and
everlasting monuments; but most of all he acquired at great expense all the
books written by Origen, and gave them to the church at Caesarea. This library was
afterwards partly destroyed; but Acatius and later on Euzoius, Bishops of that
church, endeavoured to reestablish it in parchment volumes. The last of these
recovered a great many works, and left us an inventory of them, but he shews
that he could not find the Commentary on the hundred and twenty-sixth Psalm and
the Tract on the Hebrew letter Pe, by the fact that he does not mention it. Not
that so great a man as Adamantius passed over anything, but that, through the
negligence of his successors it did not remain to times within our memory."
19. But perhaps you will say to me: "Why do you fill your paper with this
superfluous matter? Does even my friend say that it is a crime to name Origen,
or to give him praise for his talents? If Origen is proclaimed as 'such and so
great a man,' this makes us the more anxious to be told whether he is in other
passages spoken of as 'an apostolic man,' or 'a teacher of the churches,' or by
any similar expressions which appear to commend not only his talents but his
faith." This then shall be done. It was indeed for this purpose that I produced
the passage where he speaks of him as 'such and so great a man,' because it
was, if I am not mistaken, in the Preface this laudatory expression is used about
him that he also claims the right of Origen to be called an Apostle or a
Prophet, and to be praised even to the heavens. And in the same way, if there are
passages in which I happen to have praised Origen's learning, all my praise is
just of this kind. This man rouses all this alarm in you because of such
expressions of mine; but he maintains that it is unjust to bring up similar expressions
against him when they occur in his own writings. But, since he does not choose
to stand on equal terms with us before the tribunal of opinion, but condemns
us on mere suspicion, while he himself does not hold himself bound even by his
own handwriting; since he, I say, does not think it necessary in such a matter
to observe the rule of holy Scripture which demands that each man should be
judged without respect of persons; I will make answer for myself, not according
to the demands of justice, but according to his wishes. He says to me: "If you
have translated Origen, you are to be blamed; but I even if I have said the
very things for which I blame him, have done well, and these ought to be read and
held as true. If you have praised his talents or his knowledge, you have
committed a crime; if I have praised his talents, it goes for nothing."
20. Well then; he says, "Give mean instance in which I have so praised him
as to defend his system of belief." You have no right to ask this, I reply;
yet I will follow where you lead. There is a certain writing of his[1] in which
he gives a short catalogue of the works which Varro wrote for the Latins, and of
those which Origen wrote in Greek for the Christians. In this be says:
Antiquity marvels at Marcus Terentius Varro because of the countless
books which he wrote for Latin readers; and Greek writers are extravagant in their
praise of their man of brass, because he has written more works than one of us
could so much as copy. But since Latin ears would find a list of Greek writers
tiresome, I shall confine myself to the Latin Varro. I shall try to shew that
we of to-day are sleeping the sleep of Epimenides and devoting to the amassing
of riches the energy which our predecessors gave to sound if secular learning.
Varro's writings include forty-five books of antiquities, four concerning
the life of the Roman people.
But why, you ask me, have I thus mentioned Varro and the man of brass?
Simply to bring to your notice our Christian man of brass, or, rather, man of
adamant--Origen, I mean--whose zeal for the study of Scripture has fairly' earned
for him this latter name. Would you learn what monuments of his genius he has
left us? The following list exhibits them. His writings comprise thirteen books
on Genesis, two books of Mystical Homilies. notes on Exodus, notes on Leviticus
. . . also single books, four books on First Principles, two books on the
Resurrection, two dialogues on the same subject.
And, after enumerating all his works as if making an exact index, he added
what follows:
So you see the labours of this one man have surpassed those of all
previous writers both Greek and Latin. Who has ever managed to read all that he has
written? Yet what reward have his exertions brought him? He stands condemned by
his bishop, Demetrius, only the bishops of Palestine, Arabia, Phoenicia, and
Achaia dissenting. Imperial Rome consents to his condemnation, and even convenes a
senate to censure him, not--as the rabid hounds who now pursue him
cry--because of the novelty or heterodoxy of his doctrines, but because men could not
tolerate the incomparable eloquence and knowledge, which, when once he opened his
lips, made others seem dumb.
I have written the above quickly and incautiously, by the light of a poor
lantern. You will see why, if you think of those who to-day represent Epicurus
and Aristippus.
21. Now suppose that while you were writing this, as you tell us you did,
quickly not cautiously, by the poor glimmering light of a lantern, some Prophet
had stood by you and had cried out: "O writer, suppress those words, restrain
your pen; for the thee is coming and is not far off when you will make a schism
and separate yourself from the church; and, in order that you may find a
colorable excuse for this schism, you will begin to defame these very books which
you now make out to be so admirable. You will -then say that the man whom you
call your own Brazen-heart,[1] and whose name you are just about to write down as
Adamantine because of the merit of his praise-worthy labours, did not write
books for the edification of the soul but venomous heresies. This man, further,
whom you rightly describe as not having been condemned by Demetrius on the ground
of his belief, who you say was not accused of bringing in strange doctrines,
you will then pronounce worthy of execration because of his strange doctrines;
as to what you are writing about mad dogs bringing feigned charges against him,
you will yourself feign the same: and the Senate of Rome as you call it, you
will then stir up against him as you complain that they now do by your letters of
admonition, your vehement attestations, and satellites flying in all
directions. This is the return that you will make to your admirable Brazen-heart for all
his labours. Therefore beware how you write now, for, if you write as you are
doing and afterwards act as I have said, you will with more justice be
condemned by your own judgment than he by that of others." Would you, do you think,
have given credit to that prophet? Would you not have thought it more likely that
he was mad than that you would ever come to such a pass? The fact is that in
controversies of this kind there is no thought of sparing a friend if only an
enemy can be injured. But you go beyond even this point: you do not spare yourself
in your attempt to ruin not your enemies but your friends.
22. In the Preface to his book on Hebrew Questions, after many other
remarks, he says:
"I say nothing of Origen. His name (if I may compare small things to
great) is even more than my own the object of ill will, because though following the
common version in his Homilies which were spoken to common people, yet in his
Tomes, that is, in his fuller discussion of Scripture, he yields to the Hebrew
as the truth. and though surrounded by his own forces occasionally seeks the
foreign tongue as his ally. I will only say this about him, that I should gladly
have his knowledge of the Scriptures even if accompanied with all the ill-will
which clings to his name, and that I do not care a straw for these shades and
spectral ghosts whose nature is said to be to chatter in dark corners and be a
terror to babies."
I really can no longer wonder or complain of his unfriendly dealings with
me since he has not spared 'such men, such great men.' For another man whom he
tears to pieces is Ambrose that Bishop of sacred memory. In what manner, and
with what disparagement be attacks him, I will show in a similar way from one of
his Prefaces, in which, nevertheless, he praises Origen. It is the Preface to
Origen's homilies on Luke addressed to Paula and Eustochium.
A few days ago you told me that you had read some commentaries on Matthew
and Luke, of which one was equally dull in perception and expression, the other
frivolous in expression, sleepy in sense. Accordingly, you requested me to
translate without such trifling, our Adamantius' 39 homilies on Luke, just as they
are found in the original Greek: I replied that it was an irksome task and a
mental torment to write, as Cicero phrases it, with another man's heart, not
one's own: but vet I will undertake it as your requests reach no higher than this.
The demand which the sainted Blaesia once made at Rome, that I should'
translate into our language his twenty-five volumes on Matthew, five on Luke and
thirty-two on John is beyond my powers, my leisure and my energy. You see what
weight your influence and wishes have with me. I have laid aside for a thee my books
on Hebrew Questions to use my energies which your judgment holds fruitful in
translating these commentaries which, good or bad, are his work, and not mine:
especially as I hear on the left of me the raven--that ominous bird--croaking
and mocking in an extraordinary way at the colours of all the other birds,
because of his own utter blackness. And so, before he change his note, I confess that
these treatises are Origen's recreation no less than dice are a boy's: very
different are the serious pursuits of his manhood and of his old age. If my
proposal meet with your approbation, if I am still able to undertake the task, and
if the Lord grant me opportunity to translate them into Latin so that I may
complete the work I have now deferred, you will then be able to see, aye, and all
who speak Latin will learn through you, the mass of valuable knowledge of which
they have hitherto been ignorant, but which they have now begun to acquire.
Besides this I have arranged to send you shortly the commentaries on Matthew of
that eloquent man Hilarius, and of the blessed martyr Victorians, which,
different as their style may be, one spirit has enabled them to write: these will give
you some idea of the study which our Latins also have in former days bestowed
upon the Holy Scriptures.
23. You see by this what his opinions are about Origen and also about
Ambrose. If he should deny that his strictures apply to Ambrose, which every one
knows, he will be convicted in the first place by the fact that there is a
Commentary of his on Luke which is current among the Latins, and none by any other
hand. But secondly he knows that I possess a letter of his in which, while he
discharges others, he makes his strictures fall upon Ambrose. But, since that
letter contains certain more secret matters, I do not wish to see it published
before the right thee; and therefore I will corroborate what I say by other proofs
similar to it. In the meantime let this be counted as demonstrated by what I
have said above, that he extols Origen's writings as in every way admirable, and
declares that 'if he translates them, the Roman tongue will then recognize what
a store of good it had hitherto been ignorant of and now has begun to
understand,' that is the twenty six books on Matthew, the five on Luke, and the thirty
two on John. These are the books to which he gives the highest honour; and in
these absolutely everything is to be found which is contained in the books on
<greek>Peri</greek> A<greek>rkpn</greek> the groundwork of his charges against
me, only set forth with greater I breadth and fulness. If then he promises that
he will translate these, why does he condemn me for a similar course? But now I
have undertaken to prove how violently he attacks a man who is worthy of all
admiration, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who was not to that church alone bat to all
the churches like a column or an impregnable fortress. I will therefore set
forth a Preface of his by which you may see in what foul and unworthy terms he
assails even a man of such eminence, and also how he praises Didymus to the sky,
though he has since cast him down even to the infernal region; and further how
he speaks of the city of Rome, which now through the grace of God is reckoned
by Christians as their capital, words which were only applicable when its
inhabitants were a nation who were heathens and princes who were persecutors.
24. The Preface is that for the treatise of Didymus on the Holy Spirit. It
is addressed to Paulinianus, and is as follows.
"While I was an inhabitant of Babylon, a settler in the land of the purple
harlot, and lived under the law of the Quirites, I attempted to write some
poor stuff about the Holy Spirit and dedicated the work to the Pontiff of that
city. When on a sudden that pot which Jeremiah saw after the almond rod began to
seethe from the face of the North; and the whole senate of the Pharisees raised
a clamour and no mere imaginary scribe but the whole faction of the ignorant
as if had declared war against them, laid their heads together against me. I
therefore returned with all speed to Jerusalem, like a man going back to his home,
and, after having lived in sight of the cottage of Romulus and the Lupercal[2]
with its naked games, I am now in sight of Mary's inn and the Saviour's cave.
And so, Paulinianus my dear brother, since the aforenamed Pontiff Damasus, who
had impelled me to undertake this work, now sleeps in the Lord, it is here in
Judea that I warble the song which I could not sing in a strange land, provoked
thereto by you and by Paula and Eustochium those handmaids of Christ whom I
revere, and aided by your prayers; for this land which bore the Saviour is more
august to me than that which bore the man who slew his brother.[3] I have in the
title ascribed the work to its true authors for I preferred to be known. as the
translator of another man's work than to. imitate certain people and, like the
ungainly jackdaw, deck myself in another bird's plumage. I read some thee ago
the treatise of a certain person. on the Holy Spirit, and I recognized then,
according to the sentence of Terence,[4] bad things in Latin taken from good
things in Greek. There is nothing in it of close reasoning, nothing downright and
manly, such as draws us into assent even against our will, but all is flaccid
and soft, sleek and pretty, picked out with the rarest colours. But Didymus,[5]
my own Didymus, who has the eyes of the bride in the Song of Songs, those eyes
which Jesus bade us lift up upon the whitening fields, looks afar into the
depths, and has once more given us cause to call him, as is our wont, the Seer'
Prophet. Whoever reads the work will recognize. the plagiarisms of the Latins, and
will despise the derivative streams, as soon as he begins to drink at the
fountain head, He is rude in speech, yet not in knowledge;[6] his very style marks
him as one like the apostle as well by the grandeur of the sense as by the
simplicity of the words."
25. You observe bow he treats Ambrose. First, he calls him a crow and says
that he is black all over; then he calls him a jackdaw who decks himself in
other birds' showy feathers; and then he rends him with his foul abuse, and
declares that there is nothing manly in a man whom God has singled out to be the
glory of the churches of Christ who has[1] spoken of the testimonies of the Lord
even in the sight of persecuting kings and has not been alarmed. The saintly
Ambrose wrote his book on the Holy Spirit not in words only but with his own
blood; for he offered his life-blood to his persecutors and shed it within himself,
although God preserved his life for future labours. Suppose that he did follow
some of the Greek writers belonging to our Catholic body, and borrowed
something from their writings, it should hardly have been the first thought in your
mind, (still less the object of such zealous efforts as to make you set to work to
translate the work of Didymus on the Holy Spirit,) to blaze abroad what you
call his plagiarisms, which were very possibly the result of a literary necessity
when he had to reply at once to some ravings of the heretics. Is this the
fairness of a Christian? Is it thus that we are to observe the injunction of the
Apostle,[2] "Do nothing through faction or through vain glory"? But I might turn
the tables on you and ask,[3] Thou that sayest that a man should not steal dost
thou steal? I might quote a fact I have already mentioned, namely, that, a
little before you wrote your commentary on Micah, you had been accused of
plagiarizing from Origen. And you did not deny it, but said: "What they bring against
me in violent abuse I accept as the highest praise; for I wish to imitate the
man whom we and all who are wise admire." Your plagiarisms redound to your
highest praise; those of others make them crows and jackdaws in your estimation. If
yon act rightly in imitating Origen whom you call second only to the Apostles,
why do you sharply attack another for following Didymus, whom nevertheless you
point to by name as a Prophet and an apostolic man? For myself I must not
complain, since you abuse us all alike. First you do not spare Ambrose, great and
highly esteemed as he was; then the man of whom you write that he was second only
to the Apostles, and that all the wise admire him, and whom you have praised up
to the skies a thousand times over, not as you say in two, but in innumerable
places, this man who was before an Apostle, you now turn round and make a
heretic. Thirdly, this very Didymus whom you designate the Seer-Prophet, who has the
eye of the bride in the Sung of Songs, and whom you call according to the
meaning of his name[1] an Apostolic man, you now on the other hand criminate as a
perverse teacher, and separate him off with what you call your censor's rod,
into the communion of heretics. I do not know whence you received this rod. I know
that Christ once gave the keys to Peter: but what spirit it is who now
dispenses these censors' rods, it is for you to say. However, if you condemn all those
I have mentioned with the same mouth with which you once praised them, I who
in comparison of them am but like a flea, must not complain, I repeat, if now
you tear me to pieces, though once you praised me, and in your Chronicle[2]
equalled me to Florentius and Bonosus for the nobleness, as you said, of my life.
26. There is also an astonishing action of his in relation to Melania,
which I must not pass by in silence because of the shame which those who hear it
may feel. She was the granddaughter of the Consul Marcellinus; and in these very
Chronicles a he had narrated how she was the first lady of the Roman nobility
to visit Jerusalem; how she had left her son, then a little child, behind her
at Rome, and how the name of Thecla was given her on account of her signal merit
and virtue. But afterwards, when he found that some of his deeds were
disapproved by this lady through the stricter discipline of her life, he erased her
name from all the copies of his work.
It has been necessary for me to bring together the large number of
passages which I have adduced from his works, so as to put to the test the truth of
his statement,[4] that it is only in two short prefaces that he has made mention
of Origen with praise, and that not because of his faith but his talent; that
he has praised in him the commentator not the doctrinal teacher. I have actually
brought forward ten.
27. But there is danger of expanding my treatise too far and becoming
burdensome to the reader; it is sufficient that in the passages I have cited he
speaks of Origen as almost an Apostle and a teacher of the churches, and says that
it is not because of his novel doctrines as the mad dogs pretend that the
senate of Rome is excited against him; that he follows him because be himself and
all the wise approve him; and all the other testimonies, adduced from his
prefaces which are inserted above. But, however these matters may stand, and whatever
your relations may be to these writers whether ancient or modern, and whether
you call them Apostles or mere wantons,[1] Prophets or perverse teachers, what
is that to me? It is for you to do penance for all your changes of opinion,
your violent words and the wounds you have inflicted on good men, whether you have
vet done so or not. As for myself, what is the meaning of your saying "If they
have followed me when I erred, let them follow me also in my amendment?" Get
thee behind me! Far be such a thing from me. I never followed you or any other
man in your errors, but in the strength of Christ I will follow, not you nor any
other man, but the Catholic church. But you, who have written all these things
who have followed those whom you knew to be in error, you who, as I have
shewn, have written so unworthily of God, go you, I say, and do penance, if at least
you have any hope that your crime of blasphemy can be pardoned.
27 a. I ask whether you can produce anything which I have written, by
which you may convict me of having fallen into heresy even in my youth,--anything
of such a character as the heresies of which, though you will not confess it,
you now stand convicted. I said that I had followed or imitated you in your
system of translating, in that alone and in nothing else. Yet you say that by this I
have done you all the injury which you complain of. I followed you in such
things as I saw that you had done in the Homilies on the Gospel according to Luke.
Take the passage: "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced
in God my Saviour." When you found that the Greek Commentary had something
relating to the Son of God which was not right, you passed it over; whereas the
words about the Spirit, which as you may remember, are expressed in the ordinary
way, you not only did not pass over but added a few words of your own to make
the expression more clear. And so in the note on the words,[2] "Behold, when the
voice of thy salutation came into my ears, the babe leaped in my womb" you
render: "Because this was not the beginning of his substance," and you add of your
own the words "and nature," though both these and a thousand other things in
your translations of these homilies or those on Isaiah or Jeremiah, but more
particularly in those on Ezekiel, you have now withdrawn. But, in certain places
where you found things relating to the faith, that is the Trinity, expressed in
a strange manner, you left out words at your discretion. This mode of
translation we have both of us observed, and if any one finds fault with it, it is you
who ought to make answer, since you made use of it before me. But now the
practice which you blame is undoubtedly one for which you may yourself incur blame.
The practice of translating word for word you formerly pronounced to be both
foolish and injurious. In this I followed you. You can hardly mean that I am to
repent of this because you have now changed your opinion, and say that you have
translated the present work with literal exactness. In previous cases you took
out what was unedifying in matters of faith, though you did so in such a way as
not to excise them wholly nor in all cases. For instance, in the Homilies on
Isaiah, at the Vision of God[1] Origen refers the words to the Son and the Holy
Spirit; and so you have translated, adding, however, words of your own which
would make the passage have a more acceptable sense. It stands thus: "Who are then
these two Seraphim? My Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit:" but you add of
your own, "And do not think that there is any difference in the nature of the
Trinity, when the functions indicated by the several persons are 'preserved."
The same thing I have done in a great many cases, either cutting out words or
bending them into a sounder meaning. For this you bid me do penance. I do not
think that you are of this opinion as regards yourself. If then on this ground no
penitence is due from either of us, what other things are there of which you
invite me to repent?
28. I repeat that there are no writings of mine in which there is any
error to be corrected. There are many of yours which, as I have shewn, according to
your present opinion, ought to be wholly condemned. You made an exception in
favour of the Commentaries on the Ephesians, in which you Imagined that you had
written more correctly. i But even you must have seen, as I have shewn, how
like they are all through to Origen's views; and, indeed, how they contain
something more extreme than the views of which you demand the condemnation. And, were
it not that you had cut yourself off from the power of repentance by saying
"Read over my Commentaries on the Ep. to the Ephesians, and you will acknowledge
that I have opposed the doctrines of Origen;" possibly you might wish to turn
round and do penance for those, and in this case, as in the rest, to condemn
yourself. As far as I am concerned, I give you full leave to repent of these also;
indeed, the best thing that you can do is to do penance for all that you have
said and also for all that you are going to say; for it is certain that all that
you have ever written is to be repented of. But if any one blame me for having
translated anything at all of Origen's, then I say that I am the last of many
who have done the deed, and the blame, if any, should begin with the first. But
does any one ever punish a deed the doing of which he had not previously
forbidden. We did what was permissible. If there is to be a new law, it holds good
only for the future. But it may be said that the works themselves ought to be
condemned and their author as well. If that be so, what is to happen to the other
author who writes the same things, as I have shewn most fully above? He must
receive a similar judgment. I do not ask for this nor press for it, although he
acts a hostile part towards me. But I cannot but see that he is heaping up such
a judgment for himself by his rash condemnation of others.
29. But I must deal with you once more by quoting your own words. You say
of me in that invective of yours[1] that I have by my translation shewn that
Origen is a heretic while I was a Catholic. The words are: "That is to say, I am
a Catholic, but he whom I was translating is a heretic." Yes you say it, I have
read it. Well then, if, as you tell us, the result of my whole work is to show
that I am a Catholic and Origen a heretic, what more do you want? Is not your
whole object gained if Origen is proved a heretic and I a Catholic? If you bear
witness that I have said this and have thus given you satisfaction by the
whole of my work, what cause of accusation against me remains? What purpose was
served by that Invective of yours against me? If I proved Origen to be a heretic
and myself a Catholic, was I right or not? If I was, then why do you subject to
blame and accusation what was rightly done? But, if it was not fight that
Origen should be called a heretics why do you make a charge against me on that head?
What need was there for you to translate in a worse sense what I had already
translated according to your principles, though in a less elegant style?
Especially what need was there for you to play your readers false, and, when they
expected one thing, for you to do another? They imagine that you are acting in
opposition to those who defend Origen as Catholic; but the person whom you combat
and accuse is the man who you say has pronounced him a heretic. Perhaps it was
for this that you invited me to do penance; and I had misunderstood you. But
even of this I must say that I could not repent, if my repentance implied that I
thought all things which are found in his works are catholic. Whether what is
uncatholic is his own or, as I think, inserted by others, God only knows: at all
events these things, when brought to the standard of the faith and of truth are
wholly rejected by me. What then is it that you want me to say? That Origen is
a heretic? That is what you say that I have done, and you blame it. That he is
a catholic then? Again you make this a ground of accusation against me. Point
out more clearly what you mean; possibly there is something which you can find
out that lies between the two. This is all the wit that you have gathered from
the acuteness of Alexander and Porphyry and Aristotle himself: This is the
issue of all the boasting which you make of having from infancy to old age been
versed and trained in the schools of rhetoric and philosophy, that you set forth
with the intention of pronouncing sentence on Origen as a heretic, and in the
very speech in which you are delivering judgment turn upon the man whom you are
addressing and accuse him because he also has shown Origen to be a heretic. I
beg all men to note that there is in all this no care for the faith or for truth,
no earnest thought of religion and sound judgment; there is nothing but the
practised lust of evil speaking and accusing the brethren which works in his
tongue, nothing but rivalry with his fellow men in his heart, nothing but malice
and envy in his mind. So much is this the case that, before any cause of ill
feeling existed, and I spoke of you with praise as my brother and colleague, you
nevertheless were angry at my advances. Forgive me for not knowing that you were
what the Greeks call acatonomastos (<greek>akatotomastos</greek>), one whom no
one dares to address by name. Still, I wonder that you should call upon me to
condemn what you complain of me for branding as wrong.
30. It seems needless to make any answer to that part of his indictment in
which he says that the works of the Martyr Pamphilus, expressed as they are
with so much faithfulness and piety, are either not to be considered genuine or
if genuine, to be treated with contempt. Is there any one to whose authority he
will bow? Is there any one whom he will refrain from abusing? All the old Greek
writers of the church, according to him, have erred. As to the Latins, how he
disparages them, how he attacks them one by one, both those of the old and
those of modern times, any one who reads his various work knows well. Now even the
Martyrs fail to gain any respect from him. "I do not believe," he says "that
this is really the work of tim Martyr." If such an argument were admitted in the
case of the works of any writer, how can we prove their genuineness in any
particular case? If I were to say, It is not true that books of Miscellanies are
Origen's as you maintain how can they be proved to be his? His answer is, From
their likeness to the rest. But, just as, when a man wants to forge some one's
signature, he imitates his handwriting, so he who wishes to introduce his own
thoughts under another man's name. is sure to imitate the style of him whose name
he has assumed. But, to pass over for brevity's sake all that might with great
justice be said on this point, if you were determined to be so bold as to
question the works of the Martyr, you ought to have brought out publicly the actual
statements which seemed to you liable to question, and then every reader could
have seen what was absurd in them and what was reasonable. what was unsuitable
to or against the system of the Apostles; and especially the great impiety,
whatever it may have been, in expiation of which you tell us that the Martyr shed
his blood. A man who read those actual words would be able to say, not, as now,
on your judgment but on his own, either that the martyr had gone wrong, or
that a treatise which was so full of absurdity and unbelief had been composed by
some one else. But, as it is, you know well that if the writings which you
impugn are read by any one, the blame will be turned back upon him who has unjustly
found fault; and therefore you do not cite the passages which you impugn, but
with that 'censor's rod' of yours, and by your own arrogant authority, you make
your decrees in this style: "Let this book be cast out. of the libraries, let
that book be retained; and again, if today a book is accepted, tomorrow if any
one but myself has praised it, let it be cast out, and with it the man who
praised it. Let this one be counted as Catholic, even though he seems at times to
have gone wrong; let that man have no pardon for his error, even though he has
said the same things as myself, and let no man translate him nor read him, for
fear he should recognize my plagiarisms. This man indeed was a heretic, but he
was my master. And this other, though he is a Jew, and of the Synagogue of Satan,
and is hired to sell words for gain, yet he is my master who must be preferred
to all others, because it is among the Jews alone that the truth of the
Scriptures dwells." If the universal Church had with one voice conferred on you this
authority, and had demanded of you that you should be the judge of each and
all, would it not have been your duty to refuse to allow so heavy and perilous a
burden to be laid upon you? But now we have made such progress in the daily
habit of disparaging others that we no longer spare even the martyrs. But let us
suppose that the work is not that of the martyr Pamphilus, but of some other
unknown member of the church; did he, whoever he may have been, employ his own
words, I ask, so that we are called upon to defer to the merits of the writer? No.
He sets out quotations from the works of Origen himself, and exhibits his
opinion upon each question not in the words of the apologist but in those of the
accused himself; and, just as in the present treatise what I have quoted from
your writings carried much more force than what I have said myself, so also the
defence of Origen lies not in the authority of his apologist, but in his own
words. The question of authorship is superfluous, when the defence is so conducted
as to dispense with the author's aid.
31. But I must come to that head of his inculpation of me which is most
injurious and full of ill-will; nay, not of ill-will only but of malice. He says:
Which of all the wise and holy men before us has dared to attempt the
translation of these books which you have translated? I myself, he adds, though asked
by many, to do it, have always refused. But the fact is, the excuse to be made
for those holy men is easy enough; for it by no means follows because a man of
Latin race is a holy and a wise man, that he has an adequate knowledge of the
Greek language; it is no slur upon his holiness that he is wanting in the
knowledge of a foreign tongue. And further, if he has the knowledge of the Greek
language, it does not follow that he has the wish to make translations. Even if he
has such a wish, we are not to find fault with him for not translating more than
a few works, and for translating some rather than others. Every man has power
to do as he likes in such matters according to his own free will or according
to the wish of any one who asks him to make the translation. But he brings
forward the case of the saintly men Hilary and Victorinus, the first of whom, though
well-known as a commentator, translated nothing, I believe, from the Greek;
while the other himself tells us that he employed a learned presbyter named
Heliodorus to draw what he needed from the Greek sources, while he himself merely
gave them their Latin form because he knew little or nothing of Greek. There is
therefore a very good reason why these men should not have made this
translation. That you should have acted in the same way is, I admit, a matter for wonder.
For what further audacity, what larger amount of rashness, would have been
required to translate those books of Origen, after you had put almost the whole of
their contents into your other works, and, indeed, had already published in
books bearing your own name all that is said in those. which you now declare
worthy of blame?
32. Perhaps it was a greater piece of audacity to alter the books of the
divine Scriptures which had been delivered to the Churches of Christ by the
Apostles to be a complete record of their faith by making a new translation under
the influence of the Jews. Which of these two things appears to you to be the
less legitimate? As to the sayings of Origen, if we agree with them, we agree
with them as the sayings of a man; if we disagree, we can easily disregard them as
those of a mere man. But how are we to regard those translations of yours
which you are now sending about everywhere, through our churches and monasteries,
through all our cities and walled towns? are they to be treated as human or
divine? And what are we to do when we are told that the books which bear the names
of the Hebrew Prophets and lawgivers are to be had from you in a truer form
than that which was approved by the Apostles? How, I ask, is this mistake to be
set right, or rather, how is this crime to be expiated? We hold it a thing worthy
of condemnation that a man should have put forth some strange opinions in the
interpretation of the law of God; but to pervert the law itself and make it
different from that which the Apostles handed down to us,--how many times over
must this be pronounced worthy of condemnation? To the daring temerity of this act
we may much more justly apply your words: "Which of all the wise and holy men
who have gone before you has dared to put his hand to that work?" Which of them
would have presumed thus to profane the book of God, and the sacred words of
the Holy Spirit? Who but you would have laid hands upon the divine gift and the
inheritance of the Apostles?
33. There has been from the first in the churches of God, and especially
in that of Jerusalem, a plentiful supply of men who being born Jews have become
Christians; and their perfect acquaintance with both languages and their
sufficient knowledge of the law is shewn by their administration of the pontifical
office. In all this abundance of learned men, has there been one who has dared to
make havoc of the divine record handed down to the Churches by the Apostles
and the deposit of the Holy Spirit? For what can we call it but havoc, when some
parts of it are transformed, and this is called the correction of an error? For
instance, the whole of the history of Susanna, which gave a lesson of chastity
to the churches of God, has by him been cut out, thrown aside and dismissed.
The hymn of the three children, which is regularly sung on festivals in the
Church of God, he has wholly erased from the place where it stood. But why should I
enumerate these cases one by one, when their number cannot be estimated? This,
however, cannot be passed over. The seventy translators, each in their
separate cells, produced a version couched in consonant and identical words, under the
inspiration, as we cannot doubt, of the Holy Spirit; and this version must
certainly be of more authority with us than a translation made by a single man
under the inspiration of Barabbas. But, putting this aside I beg yon to listen,
for example, to this as an instance of what we mean. Peter was for twenty-four
years Bishop of the Church of Rome. We cannot doubt that, amongst other things
necessary for the instruction of the church, he himself delivered to them the
treasury of the sacred books, which, no doubt, had even then begun to be read
under his presidency and teaching. What are we to say then? Did Peter the Apostle
of Christ deceive the church and deliver to them books which were false and
contained nothing of truth? Are we to believe that he knew that the Jews possessed
what was true, and yet determined that the Christians should have what was
false? But perhaps the answer will be made that Peter was illiterate, and that,
though he knew that the books of the Jews were truer than those which existed in
the church, yet he could not translate them into Latin because of his linguistic
incapacity. What then! Was the tongue of fire given by the Holy Spirit from
heaven of no avail to him? Did not the Apostles speak in all languages?
34. But let us grant that the Apostle Peter was unable to do what out
friend has lately done. Was Paul illiterate? we ask; He who was a Hebrew of the
Hebrews, touching the law a Pharisees brought up at the feet of Gamaliel? Could
not he when he was at Rome, have supplied any deficiencies of Peter? Is it
conceivable that they, who prescribed to their disciples that they should give
attention to reading,' did not give them correct and true reading? These men who bid
us not attend to Jewish fables and genealogies, which minister questioning
rather than edification; and who, again, bid us beware of, and specially watch,
those of the circumcision; is it conceivable that they could not foresee through
the Spirit that a time would come, after nearly four hundred years, when the
church would find out that the Apostles had not delivered to them the truth of the
old Testament, and would send an embassy to those whom the apostles spoke of
as the circumcision, begging and beseeching them to dole out to them some small
portion of the truth which was in their possession: and that the Church would
through this embassy confess that she had been for all those four hundred years
in error; that she had indeed been called tile Apostles from among the Gentiles
to be the bride of Christ, but that they had not decked her with a necklace of
genuine l jewels; that she had fondly thought that they were precious stones,
but now had found out that those were not true gems which the Apostles had put
upon her, so that she felt ashamed to go forth in public decked in false
instead of true jewels; and that she therefore begged that they would send her
Barabbas, even him whom she had once rejected to be married to Christ, so that in
conjunction with one man chosen from among her own people, he might restore to her
the true ornaments with which the Apostles had failed to furnish her.
35. What wonder is there then that he should tear me to pieces, being as I
am of no account; or that he should wound Ambrose, or find fault with Hilary,
Lactantius and Didymus? I must not greatly grieve over any injury of my own in
the fact that be has attempted to do my work of translating over again, when he
is only treating me with the same contempt with which he has treated the
Seventy translators. But this emendation of the Seventy, what are we to think of it?
Is it not evident, bow greatly the grounds for the heathens' unbelief have
been increased by this proceeding? For they take notice of what is going on
amongst us. They know that our law has been amended, or at least changed; and do you
suppose they do not say among themselves, "These people are wandering at
random, they have no fixed truth among them, for you see how they make amendments
and corrections in their laws whenever they please," and indeed it is evident
that there must havebeen I previous error where amendment has supervened, and that
things which undergo change at the hand of man cannot possibly be divine.
This has been the present which you have made us with your excess of
wisdom, that we are all judged even by the heathen as lacking in wisdom. I reject
the wisdom which Peter and Paul did not teach. I will have nothing to do with a
truth which the Apostles have not approved. These are your own words:[1] "The
ears of simple men among the Latins ought not after four hundred years to be
molested by the sound of new doctrines." Now you are yourself saying: "Every one
has been under a mistake who thought that Susanna had afforded an example of
chastity to both the married and the unmarried. It is not true. And every One who
thought that the boy Daniel was filled with the Holy Spirit and convicted the
adulterous old men, was under a mistake. That also was not true. And every
congregation throughout the universe, whether of those who are in the body or of
those who have departed to be with the Lord, even though they were holy martyrs or
confessors, all who have sting the Hymn of the three children have bean in
error, and have sung what is false. Now therefore after four hundred years the
truth of the law comes forth for us i it has been bought with money from the
Synagogue. When the world has grown old and all things are hastening to their end,
let us change the inscriptions upon the tombs of the ancients, so that it may be
known by those who had read the story otherwise, that it was not a gourd[2] but
an ivy plant under whose shade Jonah rested; and that, when our legislator
pleases, it will no longer be the shade of ivy but of some other plant.
36. But Origen also, you will tell us, in composing his work called the
Hexapla, adopted the asterisks,[3] taking them from the translation of
Theodotion. How is this? Yon produce Origen sometimes for condemnation, sometimes for
imitation, at your own caprice. But can it be admitted as right that you should
bring in the same man as your advocate whom just now you were accusing? Can you
take as an authority for your actions whom you yourself have previously
condemned, and to the condemnation of whom you stirred up the Roman senate? You ought
to have made provision for this beforehand. No man begins by cutting the trunk
of a tree when he is intending to lean against it; and no man first impugns the
faith of another and then invokes his faith in his own defence. Whether Origen
did as you say or not, makes no difference to you. If you wish that his case
should be a precedent for yours, read over your judgment upon him, and see what
you have said. You used the expression: "This is not clearing yourself but only
seeking abettors of your crime." Apply this to yourself; your business is not
to seek abettors of your crime, but to find means of justification for your
conduct. However, let us see whether anything of the kind was done by Origen whom
you make both plaintiff and defendant. I do not find a single passage which he
translated froth the Hebrew. How then can your action and his be said to be
alike? What he did was this. He proved that apostates and Jews had translated the
writings which the Jews specially read: and, since it would frequently happen in
the course of discussion that they falsely asserted that some" things had been
taken out and others put in in our copies of the Scriptures, Origen desired to
shew to our people what reading obtained among the Jews. He therefore wrote
out each of their versions in separate pages or columns, and pointed out by means
of certain specified marks at the head of each line what had been added or
Subtracted by them; and he merely put these marks of his in the work of others,
not in his own; so that we might understand not what we ourselves but what the
Jews believed to have been either removed or inserted. This was no more than what
is done in the army when a list is made out containing the names of the
soldiers. If the captain wishes to see how many of them have survived after an
action, he sends a man to make inquiry; and he makes his own mark, a
(<greek>q</greek>) (theta), for instance, as is commonly done, against the name of each soldier
who has fallen, and puts some other mark of his own to designate the
survivors. Do you suppose that he who makes one mark against the name of a dead man and
another of his own against that of a survivor, will be thought to have done
anything which causes the one to be dead and the other to be alive? He has only,
as is well understood, marked the names of those who have been killed by others,
so as to call attention to the fact. Just in the same way, Origen pointed out
by certain marks of his own, namely, the signs of asterisks and obeli,[1] which
words had been, so to speak, killed by other translators, and those which had
been superfluously introduced. But he put in no single word of his own, nor did
he make it appear that the certainty of our copies was in any point shaken;
but those things which, as the actual words run, seemed wanting in plainness and
clearness, he showed to be full of the mysteries of a spiritual meaning. What
comfort then can the conduct of Origen give you in this matter, when your work
is shown to be quite unlike his, and when all your labour is spent upon making
one letter kill the next, whereas his endeavour, on the contrary, is to
vindicate the Spirit which giveth life?
37. This action is yours, my brother, yours alone. It is clear that no one
in the church has been your companion or confederate in it, but only that
Barabbas whom you mention so frequently. What other spirit than that of the Jews
would dare to tamper with the records of the church which have been handed down
from the Apostles? It is they, my brother, you who were most dear to me before
you were taken captive by the Jews, it is they who are hurrying you into this
abyss of evil. It is their doing that those books of yours are put forth in which
you brand your Christian brethren, not sparing even the martyrs, and heap up
accusations speakable and unspeakable against Christians of every degree, and
mar our peace, and cause a scandal to the church. It is they who cause you to
pass sentence upon yourself and your own writings as upon words which you once
spoke as a Christian. We all of us have become worthless in your eyes, while they
and their evil acts are all your delight. If you had but listened to Paul where
he says in his Epistle:[2] " If any brother be overtaken in a fault ye who are
spiritual restore such a one in the spirit of meekness," you would never have
let your passions swell up so as altogether to break through the order of our
spiritual discipline.
Suppose that I had written something which was injurious to you; suppose
that I had done some injustice to you a man of the highest eloquence, who were
my brother and my brother presbyter, whom also I had pronounced worthy of
imitation in your method of translation: even so, this was the first complaint which
you had received of any injury on my part since friendship had been restored
between us, and that with difficulty and much trouble. But suppose that you had
reason to be offended at the fact that, in my translation of Origen, I passed
over some things which appeared to me unedifying in point of doctrine--though in
this I only did what you had done. Possibly I was deserving of blame and
correction for this. You say that some of the brethren sent letters to you demanding
that the faults of the translator should be pointed out. What then did you do,
you who are a man of spiritual attainments? What a model, what an example of
conduct in such matters is this which you have given! You not only blazen forth
the shame of your brother's nakedness to those who are without, but you yourself
tear away the covering of his nakedness. Suppose even that what I did was not
done as you had done it, suppose that, through some access of drunkenness
creeping unawares upon me, I had laid bare my own shame as the Patriarch did; would
it have been a curse which you would have incurred if you had walked backward
and made your reply like a soft cloak to cover my reproach, if the letter of the
brother who was wide-awake had veiled the brother who lay exposed through his
own drowsiness in writing?
38. But you will say, It was impossible for me to reply otherwise than I
did. The letter which I received was such that, if I had not replied and
retranslated literally the books which you had translated paraphrastically, I should
myself have been thought to be a follower of Origen. I will not at present say
anything as to the character of that letter, except that it bears the name of a
man of high rank, Pammachius: but I ask, would there have been anything
uncourteous in such a reply as this: I " My brothers we ought not readily to judge of
other men's works. You remember what you did when I had sent my books against
Jovinian to Rome,[1] and when some persons understood them in a different sense
from that in which, if my memory serves me, I bad composed them. They were read
by a great many people, and almost every one I was offended by them, you
yourself, as was believed, amongst them. Did you not on that occasion withdraw from
circulation the copies which had been exposed to sate publicly in the forum,
and send them, not to some one else, but to me, at the same thee pointing out
the grounds on which you thought so many had been offended? And I, as you
remember, wrote an Apology in new terms, so as to give a sounder meaning, as far as I
could, to expressions to which a different sense had been attributed. Well, it
is but fair that as we would that men should do to us so we should do to them:
and therefore, as you sent me back my hooks for correction, so do now with
these books: send them back to their author, and hint to him what you think
blameable in them, so that, if in anything he has gone wrong, he may correct it.
Besides, though I have exercised" my talents on man), subjects, and laboured out
many works, this is almost the first work which he has attempted, and possibly
even this he has done under compulsion, so that it is not strange if he has not
gone quite straight at first. We should not seize upon opportunities for
disparaging men who are Christians, but seek their advantage by correcting what they
have done wrong."
39. If your reply to him had been couched in terms like these, would you
not have ministered grace and edification both to him, since he has been
initiated into the fear of God, and to all your other readers, whereas these
invectives of yours are the cause of sadness and confusion to all who fear God, since
they see you a prey to this hideous lust of detraction, and the driven to the
wretched necessity of recrimination. But, as I have said, this evidence was
unnecessary. You yourself in the books you published against Jovinian, at one thee
assert, as can be shewn, the same things which you blamed in him, while at
another you fall into the opposite extreme, and declare marriage to be so disgraceful
a state that its stain cannot even be washed away by the blood of martyrdom.
But, if it appeared to you an easy thing for your friend to procure what amounts
to a correction of the dogma of the Manichaeans as it was originally expressed
in these books, and that when they were already published and placed in the
hands of many persons to copy, what difficulty would there have been in my
correcting a work which was not my own but a translation of that of another man, if
any mistakes could be pointed out in it, I will not say by reason, but even by
envy? especially when it was still in rough sheets, which I had not read over
again or corrected, and which were not published when your friends took
possession of them. Was it an impossibility to get these writings corrected which were
then In an uncorrected state? But the sting does not proceed from that quarter;
he would have found nothing to blame there It proceeds wholly from the fact
that he was afraid that it might come to light what is the source of all that he
says, and whence he gains the reputation of a learned man and a great expounder
of the Scriptures.
40. I explained the reasons which induced me to make the translation so
that it should be seen that I acted, not in the spirit of contention and rivalry,
in which he so often acts, but from the necessity which I have explained
above; and I did it as an aid to a good and useful undertaking.[1] I hoped that it
might impart something both of lucidity and of brightness to one who, though
with little culture, was composing a serious work. Do we not know cases in which
old houses have been of use in the construction of new ones? Sometimes a stone
is taken from the parts of air old house which are remote and concealed, to
decorate the portal of the new house and adorn its entrance. And at times an
edifice of modern architecture is supported by the strength of a single ancient beam.
Are we then to place ourselves in opposition to those who rightly use what is
old in building up what is new? Are we to say, You are not allowed to transfer
the materials of the old house to the new, unless you join each beam to its
beam, each stone to its stone, unless you make a portico of what was a portico
before, a chamber of what was a chamber; and this must further involve building up
the most secret recesses from what were such before, and the sewers from the
former sewers: for every large house must have such places. This is the process
of translating word for word, which in former days you esteemed inadmissible,
but which you now approve. But you claim that what is in itself unlawful is
lawful for you, while for us even what is lawful you impute as a crime. You think
it right that you should be praised for changing the words of the Sacred Books
and Divine volumes; but if we, when we imitate you in translating a human work,
pass over anything which seems to us not to be edifying, we are to have no
pardon for this at your hands, though you yourself set us the example.
41. However, let him act in these matters as he himself thinks lawful or
expedient. Let me recapitulate in the end of this book what I have said in a
scattered way in my own defence. He had said of me that it seemed as if I could
not be a heretic without him; I therefore set forth my belief and, in respect of
the resurrection of the dead I proved that he rather than I was in error, since
he spoke of the resurrection body as frail. I shewed also that he did away
with the distinction of sex in the other world, saying that bodies would become
souls women men. I next revealed the causes which had led to my translation--very
proper causes in my opinion; I shewed that it was not because I was stimulated
by contentiousness, nor because I was desirous of glory, but because I was
incited by the fear of God, that I imported a store of old Greek material to be
used in the new Latin construction, that I furbished up the old armour which had
become enveloped in rust, not with a view to excite a civil war but to repel a
hostile attack. I then introduced the chief matter on which they have laid
their forgers' hands, the adulterous blasphemy against the Son of God and the Holy
Spirit, a thing quite alien from me, but brought in by these men in their
wickedness as I shewed by quotations.
42. I then took up one by one the points in which he had blamed Origen,
with the intention of striking at me and discrediting my work of translation. I
shewed from those very Commentaries of his from which he had said that we might
expect to learn and test his belief, that on three points, namely the previous
state of the soul, the restitution of all things, and his views concerning the
devil and apostate angels, he has himself written the same things which he
blames in Origen. I convicted him of having said that the souls of men were held
bound in this body as in a prison and I proved that he had asserted' in these
very Commentaries that the whole rational creation of angels and of human souls
formed but a single body. I next shewed that, as to an association for perjury,
there was no one who had so much to do with it in its deepest mysteries as
himself; and in accordance with this I proved that the doctrine that truth and the
higher teaching ought not to be disclosed to all men was taught by him in these
same Commentaries. I next took up the question of secular literature, as to
which he had made this declaration to Christ as he sat on the judgment seat and
ordered him to be beaten: "If ever I read or possess the books of the heathen, I
have denied Thee;" and I shewed clearly that he not only reads and possesses
these books now, but that he supports all the bragging of which his teaching is
full on his knowledge of them; so much so that he boasts of having been
introduced to the knowledge of logic through the Introduction of Porphyry the prince of
unbelievers. And, while he says that it is a doctrine of the heathen, to speak
in this or that manner both about the soul and about other creatures, I shewed
that he had spoken of God in a more degrading manner than any of the heathen
when he said that God had a mother-in-law. But further, whereas he had declared
that he had only mentioned Origen in two short Prefaces, and then not as a man
of apostolic rank but merely as a man of talent, I, though for brevity's sake
only bringing forward ten of his Prefaces, established the fact that in each of
them he had spoken of him not only as an apostolic man but as a teacher of the
churches next after the apostles, and as one whose teaching was followed by
himself and all wise men.
43. Moreover, I pointed out clearly that it is habitual to him to
disparage all good men, and that, if he can find something to blame in one man after
another of those who are highly esteemed and have gained a name in literature,
he thinks that he has added to his own reputation. I shewed also how shamefully
some of Christ's[1] priests have been assailed by him; and how he has spared
neither the monks nor the virgins, nor those who live in continency, whom he had
praised before; how he has defamed in his lampoons every order and degree of
Christians; how shamefully and foully he assailed even Ambrose, that saintly man,
the memory of whose illustrious life still lives in the hearts of all men: how
even Didymus, whom he had formerly ranked among the seer-prophets and
Apostles, now he places among those whose teaching diverges from that of, the churches;
how he brands with the marks of ignorance or of foil every single writer of
ancient and of modern days; and finally does not spare even the martyrs. All
these things I have brought to the proof of his own works and his own testimony,
not to that of external witnesses. I have gone through each particular, and have
brought out the evidence from those very books of his which he most commends,
books which alone he excepted as containing nothing of which he needed to
repent, while he says that he repents of all his other sayings and writings; not that
his repentance is sincere, but that he is driven into such straits that he
must choose either to feign penitence or to forfeit the vantage ground which
enables him to bite and wound any one whom he pleases. I therefore preferred not to
touch his other writings, so that his conviction might come out of those alone
out of which he had himself closed the door of repentance. Last of all I have
shown that be has altered the sacred books which the Apostles had committed to
the churches as the trustworthy deposit of the Holy Spirit, and that he who
calls out about the audacity shewn in translating mere human works himself commits
the greater crime of subverting the divine oracles.
44. It remains that every reader of this book should give his suffrage for
one or the other of us, judging as he desires that he may himself be judged by
God; and that he should not injure his own soul by favoring either party
unjustly. Also, my beloved son Apronianus, go to Pammachius, that saintly man whose
letter is put forward by our friend in this Invective or Bill of Indictment of
his, and adjure him in Christ's name to incline in his judgment to the cause of
innocence not that of party-spirit: it is the cause of truth that is at stake,
and religion not party should be our guide. It is a precept of our Lord[1] to
"judge not according to the appearance, but judge a righteous judgment," and,
just as in each one of the least of his brethren it is Christ who is thirsty and
hungry, who is clothed and fed; so in these who are unjustly judged it is He
who is judged unrighteously. When some are hated without a cause, he will speak
on their behalf and say:[2] "You have hated me without a cause." What judgment
does he think will be formed of this cause and of his action in it before the
tribunal of Christ? He remembers well no doubt how, when the men we are speaking
of bad written and published his books against Jovinian, and men were already
reading them and finding fault with i them, he withdrew them from the hands of
the readers, and stopped their remarks, and blamed them for their blame of his
friend; and how, further, he sent the books back to the author, with the
suggestion that he should either correct those passages which bad been found fault
with, or in any way that he would set matters right. But when what I had written
fell into his hands,--it was not then a book but merely a number of imperfect,
uncorrected papers, which had been subtracted by fraud and theft by some
scoundrel; he Bid not bring it to me and complain of it, though I was close at hand;
he did not deign even to rebuke me or to convict me of wrong through some
friend, as it might have been, or even some enemy; but sent my papers to the East,
and set to work the tongue of that man who never vet knew how to control it.
Would it have been against the precepts of our religion if he had met me face to
face? Did he think me so utterly unworthy of holding controverse with him, that
it was not worth while even to argue with me? Yet for us too Christ died, for
our salvation also He shed his blood. We are sinners, I grant, but we belong to
his flock and are numbered among his sheep. Pammachius, however, must be held
in honour for his excellent deeds wrought through faith in Christ, which should
be an example to all others; for he has counted his rank as nothing worth, and
has made himself equal to the humble; consequently, I was unwilling to see him
carried away by human partisanship and contention, lest his faith should suffer
damage in any way. At all events we shall see how far he preserves a right
judgment when he sees that that great master Jerome[1] taught, in the commentaries
which he selected as satisfactory even after his repentance, the very things
which he condemns in others as being alien to his own teaching. We shall think
that his former action was a mistake due to ignorance if he recognizes it and
sets it right. As for myself, though[2] under the compulsion of necessity, I have
endeavoured to make answer to him who had attacked me with such great
bitterness, yet for this also I ask for forgiveness if I have handled the matter too
sharply; for God is my witness how truly I can say that I have kept silence on
many more points than I have brought forward. I could not wholly keep silence in
the presence of accusations which I know to be undeserved, when I heard from
many that my silence would bring their own faith into peril.
45. After this Apology had been written, one of the brethren who came to
us from you at Rome and helped me in revising it, observed that one point in my
defence had been passed over which he had heard adversely dwelt upon by my
detractors there. The point turns upon a statement in my Preface, where I said of
him who is now my persecutor and accuser that in the works or Origen which he
translated there are found certain grounds of offence in the Greek, but that he
has in his translation so cleared them away that the Latin reader will find
nothing in them which is dissonant from our faith. On this sentence they remark:
"You see how he has praised his method of translation and has borne his testimony
that in the books he has translated no grounds of offence are to be found, and
promised that he would himself follow the same method. Why then is not his own
translation free from grounds of offence, as he bears witness is the case with
the writings of the other?
46. I suppose it is not to be wondered at that I am always blamed for the
points in which I have praised him. It is quite right, no doubt. But to come to
the matter itself. I said that when grounds of offence appeared in the Greek
he had cleared them away in his Latin translation; and not wrongly; but he had
done this just in the same sense as I have done it. For instance, in the
Homilies on Isaiah, he explains the two Seraphim as meaning the Son and the Holy
Ghost? and he adds this of his own: "Let no one think that there is a difference of
nature in the Trinity when the offices of the Persons are distinguished"; and
by this he thinks that he has been able to remedy the grounds of offence. I in a
similar way occasionally removed, altered or added a few words, in the attempt
to draw the meaning of the writer into better accordance with the straight
path of the faith. What did I do in this which was different or contrary to our
friend's system? what which was not identical with it? But the difference lies
in this, that I was judging of his writings without ill-will or detraction, and
therefore saw in them not what might lend itself to depreciation, but what the
translator aimed at; whereas he is seeking for occasions for calumniating
others, and therefore finds fault with those things in my writings which he himself
has formerly written. And indeed he is right in blaming me, since I have
pronounced what he has said to be right, whereas in his judgment it is
reprehensible. This holds in reference to the doctrine he has expressed about the Trinity;
namely, that the two Seraphim are the Son and the Holy Ghost, from which
especially the charge of blasphemy is drawn, that is, if he is to be judged according
to the system which he has adopted in dealing with me. But. according to the
system which I have adopted in judging of his writings, apart from the matter of
calumny, he is not to be held guilty because of what he has added on his own
account to explain the author's meaning.
47. As regards the resurrection of the flesh, I think that my translation
contains the same doctrines which are preached in the churches. As to the other
points which relate to the various orders of created beings, I have already
said that they have nothing to do with our faith in the Deity. But if he appeals
to these for the sake of calumniating others, though they have hitherto
presented no ground of offence, I do not deny his right to do so, if he thinks well to
revoke my judgment by which he might have been absolved, and to enforce his
own, by which he ought to be condemned. It is not my judgment on him which is
blameable, but his own, which takes others to task for doing what he approves in
himself. But this iS a new method of judgment according to which I am defending
my own accuser, and he considers that he has at last gained the victory over me
when he has brought himself in guilty. But suppose that a Synod of Bishops
should accept the sentences you have pronounced, and should demand that all the
books which contain the impugned doctrines, together with their authors, should
be condemned; then these books must be condemned first as they stand in the
Greek; and then what is condemned in Greek must undoubtedly be condemned in the
Latin. Then will come the turn of your own books; they will be found to contain
the same things, even according to your Own judgment. And as it has been of no
advantage to Origen that yon have praised him, so it will be of no profit to you
that I have pleaded in your behalf. I shall then be bound to follow the
judgment of the Catholic Church whether it is given against the books of Origen or
against yours.