Apology Against Rufinus

What good does it now do me, that he swears he erred simply? Behold, his praises of me are cast up against me, and it is charged as a crime that the praise of a most simple friend was not simple nor pure praise. If he was building up authority for his own work, wishing to show whom he was following, he had at hand Hilary the Confessor, who translated nearly forty thousand lines of Origen on Job and the Psalms. He had Ambrose, whose books are almost all filled with this man's discourses; and the Martyr Victorinus, who proves his own simplicity in this, that he contrives snares for no one. Of all these he is silent, and, passing over these pillars of the Church, hunts me alone—a flea and a man of no account—through corners. Unless perhaps he will swear, with the same simplicity by which he unwittingly accused a friend, that he was ignorant of these men also.

And who will believe this of a man most learned, and one who has such knowledge of the ancient writings, especially the Greek, that while pursuing foreign things he has almost lost his own—that he should not know men of the most recent memory, and Latin men at that? From which it appears that I was not so much praised by him, as that they were not accused: so that whether that be praise (as he tries to persuade fools) or accusation, as I feel from the pain of my wound, I would have neither in the praise the glory of my equals, nor in the vituperation any comfort.

I hold your letters, in which you write that I am accused, and you urge me to answer the accuser, lest, if I be silent, I seem to acknowledge the charge. To which I replied, I confess; and though injured, I so kept the laws of friendship that I defended myself without accusing my accuser; and what one friend at Rome had objected, I said had been bandied about by many enemies throughout the whole world, so that I might not seem to be answering a man, but charges. It is another matter, if, being accused, I ought for friendship's sake to have kept silence, and while I have a besmirched face, and (so to speak) spattered with heretical stench, not even to wash it with plain water, lest he should be thought to have done me an injury.

This is neither the voice of a man, nor addressed to a man—openly to attack a friend, and to set forth his crimes under the guise of a eulogist; and not even to leave him this freedom, that he might prove himself catholic, and answer that the praise of the heretic which is objected to him arose not from assent to the heresy, but from admiration of his talent.

It had pleased him—or, as he himself wishes it to appear, he was compelled—to translate into the Latin tongue what he did not wish to translate. What need was there to drag me, absent and separated by such spaces of sea and land, into the question? To expose me to the envy of very many, so that by praising he might do me more harm than he gained profit for himself by the example?

Now too, because I have refused the eulogist, and with reversed pen have taught that I am not what my intimate friend proclaimed, he is said to be raging, and to have composed three books against me with Attic elegance, accusing me of the very things he had before praised, and objecting to me, in the translation of Origen, wicked doctrines—of which, in the little preface of his eulogy, he had said: "I shall follow the rule of my predecessors, and especially of that man of whom we made mention above; who, when he had translated into Latin more than seventy little books of Origen, which he called Homilies, and also some of the volumes written on the Apostle, in which, though several stumbling-blocks are found in the Greek, so filed down and purged everything in translating that the Latin reader finds nothing in them at variance with our faith. Him, therefore, we too, though not with the powers of eloquence, yet according to the rules of discipline, so far as we are able, follow."

Certainly these are his words; he cannot deny it. The very elegance of style and the composed diction, and, what is greater than these, the Christian simplicity, prove the character of their author. It is another matter, if Eusebius corrupted these things, and, an accuser of Origen and a devotee of mine, in one and the same work testified that both he and I had either erred or thought well. My enemy cannot now call me a heretic, whom he lately declared in his preface not to differ from his own faith. And at the same time I ask this of him too: what does his moderate and doubtful speech mean? "Nothing," he says, "will the Latin reader find in them at variance with our faith." What does he call his faith? That by which the Roman Church is strong? Or that which is contained in the volumes of Origen? If he answers "Roman," then we are Catholics, who have translated nothing of Origen's error.

But if it is the blasphemy of Origen, that is his faith; while he charges me with the crime of inconsistency, he proves himself a heretic. Whether my eulogist believes well, by his own confession he takes me as his partner; or whether he believes ill, he shows that he praised me before for this reason, that he thought me a sharer of his error. But against those books, which chatter through corners and bite me with a furtive accusation, when they shall have been published and shall have come forth from darkness into light, and shall have been able to reach us either by the zeal of brothers or the rashness of rivals, I shall try to answer. For they are not greatly to be feared, whom their own author fears to disclose, and has decreed should be read only by his confederates. Then either they will be acknowledged...

Meanwhile I have wished to be cleared before the silent judgment of the reader, and to refute a most grave charge among friends, lest he who was himself wounded and by no means directed weapons against his persecutor should seem to have injured first; but I have only laid hand to my own wound. I beg him, without prejudice to persons, to lay the fault upon him who provoked it. Not content with having injured me, as though against a mute and ever silent man, he has labored over three books, and has fabricated antitheses of Marcion out of my little works. My mind is eager to know at once both his doctrine and my unexpected folly. Perhaps in a short time he has learned what he ought to teach us; and what no one thought him to know, he will show a sudden flood of eloquence. "So may that father, so may great Jesus, make it come to pass" (from Virgil, Aeneid X). Let him begin to join hands with me.

Though he has poised the spears of his accusation, and hurled them against me with all his might, we trust in the Lord our Savior, that his truth will surround us as a shield; and we shall be able to sing with the Psalmist: "The arrows of little children have become their wounds". And: "If camps should stand against me, my heart will not fear. If war should rise against me, in this I will hope". But of this elsewhere. Now let us return to what we had begun.

His followers cast it up against me—"they take up the arms of Ceres, wearied of matters" (Aeneid, Bk. I)—asking why I translated into the Latin tongue the harmful books of Origen Peri Archon, repugnant to ecclesiastical faith. To whom this brief and succinct answer is given: your letters, brother Pammachius, and those of your friends compelled me, saying that those books had been fraudulently translated by another, and that some things had been interpolated, and either added or changed. And lest I should have little confidence in your letters, you sent me copies of that same translation, together with the little preface praising me. When I had read these, and compared them with the Greek, I noticed at once the things which Origen had impiously said about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and which Roman ears could not bear, changed by the translator into a better sense.

But the other doctrines—concerning the fall of angels, the lapse of souls, the illusions of resurrection, the world, or the intermundane spaces of Epicurus, the restitution of all things to an equal state, and much worse than these, which it would be tedious to unfold—he either translated as he found them in the Greek, or set them down exaggerated and strengthened from the little commentaries of Didymus, who is the most open champion of Origen: so that one who had read him as catholic on the Trinity might not beware of him as a heretic in other matters.

Another, perhaps, who was not his friend, would say: either change the whole, since it is bad; or set forth the whole, since you think it excellent. If for the sake of the simple you cut away whatever is harmful, and pretend that those things were added by heretics, and do not wish to transfer them into a foreign tongue, then give up whatever is harmful. But if you preserve the faith of truth in your translation, why do you change some things and leave others untouched? And yet there is an open confession in the same Preface, that you amended the bad parts and left the best. From which it follows that you will be held bound not by the translator's liberty, but by the author's authority, if anything in what you have translated is proved heretical; and you will be convicted of manifest crime, for having wished to smear the cup of poison with honey, so that a feigned sweetness might conceal the worst venom.

These things, and much harsher than these, an enemy would say; and he would drag you into the Church's court not as the translator of a bad work, but as its supporter. But I, content only to have defended myself, in the books "On First Principles" simply set forth what was in the Greek: not that the reader should believe the things I was translating, but that he should not believe those things which you had earlier translated. There was a twofold usefulness in my work, since both the heretical author is betrayed, and the untrue translator is exposed. And lest anyone should think that I agreed with what I had translated, I fortified the necessity of the translation with a preface, and taught the reader what he ought not to believe. The former translation contains praise of the Author; the second, censure. That one invites the reader to belief; this one moves him not to believe.

There I too am taken up as an unwilling praiser; here I so far do not praise him whom I translate, that I am compelled to accuse the one who praises. The same task was carried out with a different mind; nay rather, one and the same task had opposite outcomes. He took away what was there, saying it had been corrupted by heretics; and he added what was not there, asserting that it had been discussed by the same author in other places: which, unless he shows the very passages from which he says he translated it, he will not be able to prove. My concern was to change nothing of the truth. For I was translating to this end, that I might convict the bad things by translating them. Do you think me a translator? I was a betrayer: I betrayed the heretic, that I might vindicate the Church from heresy. Why I formerly praised Origen in certain respects, the book prefixed to this work shows.

Now the sole reason for my translation is rendered, which, since it had a pious intent, ought not to be charged with impiety, in betraying the impious man whose work was being handed on to the Churches as though it were pious. (Letter to Pammachius and Oceanus.)

I had translated his Seventy Books, as my close friend charges, into Latin, and many things from the tomes. There was never a question about my work; Rome was never disturbed. What need was there to hand over to Latin ears what even Greece detests, what the world accuses? I, translating so many things over so many years, was never a cause of scandal. You, over your first and only work, previously unknown, have been made famous by rashness. The Preface itself shows that the book of the martyr Pamphilus, in defense of Origen, was translated by you. And this you do with all your might, that the Church might not refute the faith which a martyr approves. Six books (as I have already said) Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, once standard-bearer of the Arian faction, wrote on behalf of Origen—a very broad and elaborate work; and he proved with many testimonies that Origen is, in his view, catholic—that is, in our view, Arian. Of these you translate the first book under the name of the martyr.

And do we wonder, if you wish me, a little man of small worth, to be a praiser of Origen, when you have brought a false charge against a martyr? Having altered a few testimonies concerning the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, which you knew would displease the Romans, you left the rest whole to the end; doing this same thing in the Apology, as it were of Pamphilus, which you also did in the translation of Origen's "On First Principles." If this is the book of Pamphilus, of the six books which will be the first of Eusebius? In the very volume which you pretend to be Pamphilus's, mention is made of the following books. In the second also, and in the rest, Eusebius says what he had already said before in the first book, and that he ought not to repeat the same things. If the whole work is Pamphilus's, why do you not translate the remaining books? If it is another's, why do you change the name?

You are silent; the facts themselves speak: namely, that men might believe a martyr, who were going to detest the prince of the Arians.

What shall I say was your intent, most simple friend? Could you have imposed the name of a martyr upon the book of a heretical man, and made the ignorant, under the authority of a witness of Christ, defenders of Origen? Given the learning in which you excel, and being praised as a distinguished writer in the West, so that all of your party call you a leader—I do not think you were ignorant of Eusebius's compilation, and that the martyr Pamphilus composed no work at all. For Eusebius himself, the lover, herald, and companion of Pamphilus, wrote three most elegant books containing the life of Pamphilus: in which, while he proclaimed his other virtues with wondrous praises and extolled his humility to the skies, he also added this in the third book: "Who among the studious was not a friend of Pamphilus? If he saw any lacking necessities for their livelihood, he generously supplied what he could. He also most readily gave the sacred Scriptures, not only for reading but even for keeping.

Nor only to men, but also to women whom he saw devoted to reading. Hence he also prepared many manuscripts, so that when necessity demanded, he might give generously to those wishing them. And he himself indeed wrote absolutely nothing of his own work, except letters which he chanced to send to friends; so far had he cast himself down in humility. But he read most studiously the treatises of the ancient writers, and was continually engaged in meditation upon them."

The defender of Origen and the eulogist of Pamphilus says that Pamphilus wrote nothing at all, nor composed anything of his own speech. And he says this after Pamphilus had already been crowned with martyrdom, so that you might have no refuge in saying, after the books published by Eusebius, that Pamphilus wrote this. What will you do? By that book which you published under the martyr's name, the consciences of very many have been wounded. The authority of bishops concerning the condemnation of Origen does not avail with those who think he was preached by a Martyr. What will the letters of bishop Theophilus do? What will those of Pope Anastasius, pursuing the heretic throughout the whole world, do, when your book, published under the name of Pamphilus, fights against their Letters, and the testimony of a Martyr is set against the episcopal name? What you did in the books "On First Principles," do also in this pseudonymous volume.

Hear a friend's counsel: do not let your skill embarrass you; either say it is not yours, or that it was corrupted by the presbyter Eusebius. From what source will it be possible for you to prove what was translated by you? Your hand is not held; you are not of such eloquence that no one can imitate you. Or certainly, if the matter comes to proof, and the testimonies of very many overwhelm the impudence of your brow, sing your recantation in the manner of Stesichorus. It is better for you to repent of your deed, than to persist both in the calumny against the martyr and in the error of the deceived. And do not blush at a change of opinion: you are not of such authority and fame that it should shame you to have erred. Imitate me, whom you love so greatly, without whom you can neither live nor die: and cry out with me the things which I, praised by you, spoke in my own defense.

Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, whom I mentioned above, in the sixth book of his Apology for Origen, brings this same charge against Methodius, bishop and martyr, which you level as an accusation against me in the midst of my praises, and says: How has Methodius now dared to write against Origen, who said this and that concerning Origen's doctrines? This is not the place to speak on behalf of the martyr: for not all things need to be discussed in every place. Let it suffice now to have touched on this—that this charge is brought by an Arian man against a most illustrious and eloquent martyr, which you both praise as a friend in me and, when offended, accuse me of. You have occasion, even from the present passage, if you wish, to fabricate a charge against me: why do I now disparage Eusebius, whom I praised elsewhere before? The name of Eusebius is indeed different in each case; but the same is the calumny regarding the name of Origen.

I praised Eusebius in the Ecclesiastical History; in the arrangement of Chronology; in the description of the Holy Land; and these very small works, translating them into Latin, I gave to the men of my own tongue. Am I therefore Arian, because Eusebius who composed these books is Arian? If you dare to call me a heretic, remember the little Preface to "On First Principles," in which you testify that I am of your faith; and at the same time I beg you to hear patiently a former friend of yours making his complaint. Against others you contend, either committing calumny or suffering it. Those whom you accuse, and by whom you are accused, are of your own order: whether rightly or wrongly, that is for you to see. To me even a true accusation against a brother is displeasing: I do not reprove others, but I say what I myself would not do. Separated from you by so great a distance of lands, what have I done wrong against you? What have I deserved?

Is it because I answered that I am not an Origenist? Is my defense your accusation? And if you are not an Origenist, or were not, I believe you when you swear it; if you were, I receive you as a penitent. Why do you grieve, if I am what you say you are? Or is it because I dared to translate Origen's books "On First Principles" after you, and my translation is thought to be a rebuke of your work? What could I have done? Your praise was sent to me, that is, my accusation. You had praised me so strongly and at such length, that if I had acquiesced in your praises, all would think me a heretic.

See what the closing of the Roman letter to me holds: "Clear away men's suspicions, and refute the accuser; lest, if you dissemble, you seem to consent." (Letter of Pammachius and Oceanus.) Constrained by such an article, being about to translate the same books, listen to what I wrote: "My friends have brought this upon me (I did not say 'my friend,' lest I seem to accuse you), that if I am silent, I am judged guilty; if I answer, I am judged an enemy. Both conditions are hard, but of the two I will choose the lighter. A quarrel can be mended; blasphemy deserves no pardon." (Letter to Pammachius and Oceanus.) Do you notice that this burden was imposed on me unwilling and resisting; and that the future estrangement arising from such a work was tempered by the excuse of necessity? If you had translated the books "On First Principles" without my name, you would rightly complain that they were afterward translated by me to your reproach.

But now you unjustly grieve that in that work I was answering you, in which by praising me you had accused me. For what you call praise, all understand to be accusation. Let it be settled with yourself that you accused; and do not be indignant that I answered. Granted, you wrote with good intent, an innocent man and most faithful friend, from whose mouth a lie never proceeded, and you wounded me unknowingly: what is that to me, who was struck? Should I not therefore be healed, because you wounded me with good intent? I lie pierced through, the wound hisses in my chest: my limbs, once fair, are now defiled with blood, and you say to me: Do not apply a hand to the wound, lest I seem to have wounded you? And yet the translation itself accuses Origen rather than you. For you emended what you thought had been added by heretics. I have betrayed what all Greece proclaims aloud was written by him. Who judged more rightly is neither my judgment nor yours.

Let the writings of both feel the reader's censorious pen. That whole Letter, in which I make satisfaction for myself, is directed against heretics and my accusers: what is it to you, who say you are both orthodox and my eulogist, if I am somewhat harsh toward heretics, and expose their tricks in public? Rejoice at my invective; lest, if you grieve, you seem to be a heretic. When one writes against vices without naming names, whoever takes offense is his own accuser. It would have befitted a prudent man, even if he grieved, to dissemble his conscience, and to dispel the cloud of his heart with the serenity of his brow.

Otherwise, if you think that whatever is said against Origen and his followers is said against you, then also the letters of Pope Theophilus and of Epiphanius, and of other bishops, which he recently translated at their own bidding, seek you out, tear at you. The imperial writings too, which order the Origenists to be expelled from Alexandria and Egypt, were dictated at my suggestion. That the Bishop of the city of Rome should detest them with wondrous hatred was my counsel. That the whole world, after your translation, blazed up in hatred of Origen, whom before it had been reading without suspicion, was the work of my pen. If I am capable of so much, I marvel that you do not fear me. I, that moderate man in the public letter (Letter 81 to Rufinus), who carefully took care that you should not think anything was said against you, wrote to you at once a brief Letter, expostulating about your praises.

Which, because you were not in Rome, my friends refused to send to you, on the grounds that they said you, along with your companions, were casting about things unworthy of the Christian name concerning my manner of life. A copy of which I have appended to this volume, that you may know with how much grief, and with how much moderation of friendship, I tempered myself.

I hear besides that you philosophically pick at certain things in my letter, and that you, a man of wrinkled brow and drawn eyebrow, sport with me in Plautine wit, because I called Barrabas the Jew my teacher. Nor is it strange if, for BAR-ANINA, where there is some similarity of the words, you should write Barrabas, since you have such license for changing names, that you have made Pamphilus out of Eusebius, and a martyr out of a heretic. A man to be watched, and by me especially to be avoided, lest suddenly, while I know it not, you name me Sardanapalus instead of Jerome. Hear then, thou pillar of wisdom, and standard of Catonian severity. I did not call him a teacher; but I wished to attest my zeal for the holy Scriptures, so as to show that I had read Origen in the same way that I had also heard him. For I ought not to have learned Hebrew letters from you.

Or has wrong been done to you, because instead of you I followed Apollinaris and Didymus? Could I not, in that letter, have named Gregory, a most eloquent man? Who among the Latins is his equal? In him I glory as my teacher and exult. But I set down only those who were under censure, that I might likewise testify that I had read Origen, not for the truth of his faith, but for the merit of his learning. Origen himself, and Clement, and Eusebius, and many others, when they discuss something from the Scriptures and wish to prove what they say, are accustomed to write thus: A Hebrew related to me; and, I heard from a Hebrew; and, This is the opinion of the Hebrews.

Certainly also Origen names the Patriarch Huillus, who lived in his times: and he concludes the thirtieth tome on Isaiah, at the end of which he expounds: Woe to thee, city Ariel, which David besieged, with that man's exposition; and though he says he had first thought otherwise, he confesses, having been taught by him, what is truer. He also judges the eighty-ninth Psalm, which is entitled: A Prayer of Moses the man of God, and the remaining eleven, which have no titles, according to Huillus's exposition, to be likewise of the same Moses; nor does he disdain, in interpreting the Hebrew Scripture, to insert at each place what seems to the Hebrews.

Having lately read the letters of Pope Theophilus, in which he sets forth the errors of Origen, he is said to have stopped his ears, and to have condemned with a loud voice before everyone the author of so great an evil, and to have said: until that time he had been ignorant that he had written such wicked things. I do not deny this, nor do I say what another perhaps would say, that he could not have been ignorant of what he translated, whose Apology, written by a heretic under the name of a martyr, he published; whose defense too he professed in a volume of his own: against which, in what follows, if there be leisure for dictation, I shall dispute. This I say, which he cannot contradict.

If it is allowed to him not to have understood what he translated, why should it not be allowed to me to have been ignorant of the books Περὶ Ἀρχῶν, which I had not read before; and to have read only those Homilies which I translated, in which there is nothing evil, as his own testimony shows? But if, on the contrary, he now accuses me in those very things in which he had before praised me, he will be caught fast on every side. For either he praised me, a heretical man, because he was of the same doctrine with me; or he now, as an enemy, accuses in vain one whom before he proclaimed as orthodox. But perhaps then, as a friend, he kept silent about my errors; and now, angered, brings forth what he had before concealed.

Although inconstancy does not deserve credit, and a professed enmity carries the suspicion of falsehood: nevertheless I will boldly join issue, wishing to know what heretical thing I have written, so that either I may join with him in doing penance, and swear that I was ignorant of Origen's evils, and that only now, from Pope Theophilus, have I learned his impieties: or certainly I may show that I indeed thought rightly, but that he, after his manner, does not understand. For it cannot be that in the same books on Ephesians, which, as I hear, he accuses, I should have spoken both well and ill; and that from the same source both sweet and bitter should have flowed: so that I, who throughout the whole work condemned those who believe souls to have been made from Angels, should suddenly, forgetful of myself, defend what I had before condemned. He cannot charge me with folly, whom he has proclaimed most eloquent and skillful in his own little works.

Otherwise, foolish verbosity is to be reckoned rather the mark of a wrangler and a babbler than of an eloquent man. What precisely he accuses in my books, I do not know. For the rumor of his charges, not the writings, has come to me: and it is foolish, according to the Apostle, to beat the air with fierce blows. Nevertheless I will answer to uncertain things, until I come to certain ones: I will teach my rival, though old, what I learned as a boy, that there are many kinds of diction; and that according to the quality of the matter, not only the sense, but even the words of the Scriptures vary.

Chrysippus and Antipater move among thorn-bushes. Demosthenes and Aeschines thunder against each other. Lysias and Isocrates flow sweetly. There is marvelous diversity among them individually, but all are perfect in their own kind. Read the books to Herennius of Tully, read his Rhetorical works: or, since he says that those, being begun and rough, slipped from his hands unfinished, unroll the three volumes On the Orator, in which he brings in the most eloquent orators of that time, Crassus and Antony, disputing; and the fourth, the Orator, which now in old age he writes to Brutus: then you will understand that History is composed one way, Orations another, Dialogues another, Letters another, Commentaries another. For I, in the Commentaries on Ephesians, followed Origen and Didymus and Apollinaris in such a way (who certainly hold contrary doctrines among themselves) that I did not lose the truth of my own faith. What is the work of Commentaries?

They set forth another's sayings, they make plain in clear speech what is obscurely written: they repeat the opinions of many; and say: This passage some expound thus: others interpret it thus: those endeavor to establish their own sense and understanding by these testimonies and by this reasoning: so that the prudent Reader, when he has read the various explanations, and learned what of many is to be approved or disapproved, may judge what is truer: and like a good money-changer, may reject the coin of counterfeit money. Shall he be held guilty of diverse interpretation and of senses contrary to one another, who in one work which he expounds has set down the expositions of very many? I suppose that as a boy you read the Commentaries of Asper on Virgil and Sallust, of Vulcatius on the Orations of Cicero, of Victorinus on his Dialogues and on the Comedies of Terence, of my teacher Donatus likewise on Virgil, and of others on others: namely Plautus, Lucretius, Flaccus, Persius, and Lucan.

Accuse their interpreters, why they did not follow one single explanation: and why on the same matter they enumerate what seems either to themselves or to others.

I pass over the Greeks, whose knowledge you boast of, and while pursuing foreign things you have almost forgotten your own tongue: lest, by the old proverb, I seem to be teaching a pig Minerva, and carrying wood into the forest. This I marvel at, that you, an Aristarchus of our time, should have been ignorant of these childish matters. Although you, absorbed in senses, and headlong in constructing calumny against me, have despised the precepts of Grammarians and orators, you make little of restoring hyperbata after their windings, of avoiding the harshness of consonants, of shunning gaping diction. It is ridiculous to point out a few wounds in a body wholly weakened and broken. I do not choose what to reprehend; let him choose himself what is free from fault. He ought not even to have known that Socratic saying: I know what I do not know:

He who is ignorant of ships fears to steer a ship; wormwood for the sick
No one dares give, save he who has learned. What belongs to physicians,
Physicians promise: craftsmen handle the crafts of craftsmen.
We write, unlearned and learned, poems everywhere.
(Horace, epist. 1 to Augustus.)

Unless perhaps he will swear that he has not learned letters; which we, without an oath, would very easily believe of him: or he will take refuge with the Apostle who professes: And though rude in speech, yet not in knowledge. That man, learned in Hebrew letters, and taught at the feet of Gamaliel, whom, now of Apostolic dignity, he is not ashamed to call his teacher, despised Greek eloquence, or certainly, out of humility, dissembled it: so that his preaching might consist not in persuasiveness of words, but in the power of signs: scorning another's wealth, he who was rich in his own; although to an unskilled man, and one collapsing at every sentence like you, Festus would never have said from the tribunal: Thou art mad, Paul: thou art mad: much learning turns thee to madness.

You, who mutter in Latin, and move rather with a tortoise's gait than walk: either you ought to write in Greek, so that among men ignorant of the Greek tongue you may seem to know foreign things: or, if you attempt Latin, you should first hear a Grammarian, withdraw your hand from the ferule, and among little children, an aged pupil, learn the art of speaking. Though one breathe forth Crassuses and Dariuses, letters do not follow the purse. They are companions of sweat and toil: allies of fasting, not of satiety: of continence, not of luxury. Demosthenes is said to have spent more oil than wine, and always to have anticipated all craftsmen by nightly vigils. What he did in expressing one single letter, that he might learn to pronounce "rho" like a dog, you charge as a crime against me, that I, a man, learned Hebrew letters from a man. Hence it is that certain unlearned men remain wise, so long as they refuse to learn what they do not know. Nor do they hear Horace admonishing:

Why prefer, out of shame, not to know rather than to learn?

Wisdom also speaks, which we read under the name of Solomon: Into a malevolent soul wisdom shall never enter, nor dwell in a body subject to sins. For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee deceit, and will withdraw from thoughts that are without understanding. It is another matter, if, content with the reading of the vulgar, they despise the ears of the learned; and scorn that saying by which impudent ignorance is branded:

Wast not thou wont, unlearned one, at the crossroads,
To ruin a wretched song upon a shrieking straw-pipe?

As if the crowd of curly-headed boys in the schools did not chant the fictions of Milesian tales: and the Testament of the Sow did not shake the limbs of the Bessi with laughter, and among the feasts of buffoons such trifles were not frequent. Every day in the streets a pretend soothsayer beats the buttocks of fools, and with a twisted scorpion-whip shakes the teeth of those who bite: and do we wonder if the books of the unlearned find a reader?

They are indignant that I wrote that the Origenists bind themselves together in the mysteries of lies. I named the book in which I read this was written; that is, the sixth Stromata of Origen, in which, composing our doctrine with the opinion of Plato, he speaks thus: Plato, in the third book of the Republic: "Truth also is to be pursued greatly. For if, as we said quite rightly a little before, a lie is unbecoming and useless to God, but sometimes useful to men (that they may use it as a condiment or a medicine); there is no doubt that such license must be given to physicians, and taken away from the imprudent. You say true, he says: therefore rulers of cities, if to any others also this is granted, must sometimes lie, either against enemies, or for their country and citizens.

But from others, who do not know how to use a lie, all lying must be taken away." Origen: "And we therefore, mindful of that precept: Speak ye truth each one with his neighbor, ought not to say, who is my neighbor? But to consider how cautiously the philosopher said: that a lie is unbecoming and useless to God, but at times useful to men; and that God is not to be thought to lie at any time, even for the sake of dispensation. But if the advantage of the hearer requires it, he speaks with ambiguous words and utters what he wishes through riddles: so that both the dignity of truth may be preserved in him, and what might be harmful, if brought forth naked before the public, may be brought forth covered with some veil.

But let the man upon whom the necessity of lying falls attend carefully, that he use a lie at times as a condiment and a medicine; that he keep its measure, lest he exceed the bounds which Judith used against Holofernes, and conquered him by prudent dissimulation of words. Let him imitate Esther, who long kept silent the truth of her people, and bent the mind of Artaxerxes. And above all the Patriarch Jacob, whom we hold to have obtained his father's blessings by a crafty device. From which it is plain, that unless we lie in such a way that some great good is sought for us thereby, we are to be judged as enemies of him who says: I am the truth." These things Origen wrote, we cannot deny: he wrote them in books which he addressed to the perfect and to disciples; and he teaches that masters must lie; but that disciples ought not to lie.

He therefore who lies well, and without any shame invents whatever comes into his mouth against the brethren, proves himself the best of masters.

He is also said to carp at this, that in interpreting the Psalm, for what we read in Latin, apprehend discipline: and in the Hebrew volume it is written Nescu bar, I said in my little Commentaries, adore the son. And again, in translating the whole Psalter into Roman speech, as though forgetful of the ancient exposition, I set down, adore purely: which indeed is manifest to all to be contrary to itself. And truly he is to be pardoned, if he is ignorant of the truth of the Hebrew tongue, seeing that he sometimes hesitates even in Latin. NESCU, that I may interpret word for word, is said καταφιλήσατε, that is, kiss ye: which I, unwilling to translate affectedly, followed rather the sense, so as to say, adore.

For since those who adore are wont to kiss the hand, and bow the head (which the blessed Job denies that he did to the elements and idols, saying: If I beheld the sun when it shone, and the moon walking in brightness: and my heart did rejoice in secret, and I kissed my hand with my mouth, which is a very great iniquity, and a denial against God most high), and the Hebrews, according to the property of their tongue, put kissing for veneration, I so translated it, as they themselves understand it, whose word it is. But BAR among them signifies various things. For it is said both son, as in that: Barjona, son of a dove, and Bartholomew, son of Tholomeus, and Bartimaeus, and Barjesus, and Barabbas. Also wheat, and a bundle of ears, and chosen, and pure. What sin then have I committed, if I translated an ambiguous word by different interpretations?

And if, in the little Commentaries, where there is freedom of discussion, I had said, adore the son; in the body of the work itself, lest I should seem a violent interpreter, and give occasion for Jewish calumny, I said, adore purely, or chosen: which Aquila also and Symmachus translated. What harm then does it do to Church faith, if the reader is taught in how many ways a single little verse is explained among the Hebrews?

Is it permitted to your Origen to treat of μετεμψύχωσις (transmigration of souls), to introduce innumerable worlds, and to clothe rational creatures in one body after another, and to say that Christ has often suffered, and will suffer more often still, so that what once profited, being assumed, may always profit: do you also take to yourself such great authority, that from a heretic you falsely make a martyr, and from Origen's books falsely allege the adulterations of heretics: shall it not be permitted to me to discuss words, and in the work of the Commentaries to teach the Latins what I have learned from the Hebrews? For unless it were both tedious, and smacked of vainglory, I would now show you what profit there is in wearing down the thresholds of teachers, and learning an art from artisans: and you would see how great a forest of ambiguous names and words there is among the Hebrews. This fact has furnished matter for diverse interpretation; since each one, among doubtful things, translates what seems to him consequent.

Why should I send you to foreign matters? Turn over Aristotle, and Alexander discoursing on the volumes of Aristotle; and by reading them you will learn how great is the abundance of ambiguities: so that you may at last cease to reprove your friend in a matter which you have never learned even in a dream.

Commentary on Ephesians. But since Paulinianus my brother has related certain things reprehended by him from the Commentaries on Ephesians, and has committed a few of these to memory, and has shown me the very passages, I ought not to shirk the matter: and I beg the reader, if I shall be a little longer than usual in setting forth and refuting the charges, to grant pardon to necessity. For I am not accusing another; but I strive to defend myself, and to refute the calumny of heresy brought against me. On the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, Origen wrote three volumes. Didymus also and Apollinaris composed their own little works. What I wrote in the Preface of this same work, whether translating or imitating them, I will subjoin: "This too I mention in the Preface, that you may know that Origen wrote three volumes on this Epistle, whom we too have in part followed: that Apollinaris also, and Didymus published certain little Commentaries.

From which, though we have culled a few things; and have added some things which seemed good to us, or subtracted them: so that the studious reader may recognize at once, at the very beginning, that this work is either another's, or our own." Whatever fault, therefore, can be shown in the exposition of this Epistle, if I shall not be able to show it in the Greek volumes, from which I said I translated into Latin, I shall acknowledge the charge, and it shall be mine, since it was not another's. Yet lest I should again seem to cavil, and by this trick of excuse not dare to join issue, I will set down the very testimonies which are called into accusation.

In the very first volume, on the testimony of Paul, where he says: As he chose us in him before the foundation of the world: that we should be holy and unspotted before him, we so interpreted it, as to say that the election was not, as Origen would have it, of those who had existed before; but we referred it to the foreknowledge of God. We said accordingly: "But that he testified that we were chosen, that we should be holy and unspotted before him, that is, before God, before the making of the world, this pertains to the foreknowledge of God, to whom all future things are already made, and before they come to pass all things are known. Just as Paul himself is predestined in his mother's womb; and Jeremiah is sanctified in the womb, chosen, strengthened, and sent as a prophet to the Gentiles, in the type of Christ." Certainly in this exposition there is no fault: and while Origen says the contrary, we have followed the Church's sense.

And because it is the office of a Commentator to set forth the opinions of many, and I had promised in the Preface that I would do this, I also set down Origen's explanation, without odium to his name, saying: "But another, who strives to show God just, on the ground that he does not choose each one from prejudgment of his own knowledge, but from the merit of the elect, says that before the visible creatures, heaven, earth, seas, and all things that are in them, there were other invisible creatures, among which also souls, which for certain causes known to God alone were cast down below, into this vale of tears, into the place of our affliction and pilgrimage, in which the saint, being placed, prayed that he might return to his former seat, saying: Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged: I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Cedar, my soul hath been long a sojourner. And the Apostle: O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

And, It is better to return, and to be with Christ. And elsewhere: Before I was humbled, I sinned," and other things of this kind, which it would be long to write. Note what I said: But another, who strives to show God just: strives to show, I say, not shows. But if you take offense in this, that I compressed Origen's very copious discussion into a brief statement, and opened his sense to the reader; and from this I seem to you to be a hidden follower of his, because I omitted nothing said by him, see whether I did this so as to avoid your calumny, lest you should say that I had suppressed what was forcefully said by him, and that he discusses more vigorously in Greek. I set down, therefore, everything, though more briefly, that I found in Greek, so that his disciples might have nothing new that they could pour into Latin ears. For we more easily despise what is known, than what is sudden.

But having set forth his interpretation, listen to what we said at the end of the chapter: "For the Apostle does not say, he chose us before the foundation of the world, when we were holy and unspotted: but he chose us that we should be holy and unspotted: that is, we who were not holy and unspotted before, that we might afterward be so. Which can also be said of sinners converted to better things; and that saying will stand: No one living shall be justified in thy sight; that is, in the whole of his life, in all the time in which he was engaged in this world.

Which indeed, so understood, makes also against him who says that souls were chosen before the world was made, on account of holiness, and no fault of sins." For (as we have already said before) Paul is not chosen, and those who are like him, because they were holy and unspotted: but they are chosen and predestined, that in the following life, through works and virtues, they may become holy and unspotted. And does anyone, after such a sentence as this, dare to accuse us of the heresy of Origen? It is nearly eighteen years since I dictated these books, at the time when Origen's name flourished in the world; when the περὶ Ἀρχῶν, his work, Latin ears did not know: and yet I professed my faith; and I showed what displeased me in him. Wherefore, even if my enemy could have shown something heretical in the rest, I should be held guilty rather of an incautious error, than of the perverse dogmas which here and in other books I have often condemned.

The second passage which my brother showed me as reprehended by him, since it is very frivolous, and openly displays its own calumny, I shall set down briefly. In that testimony where Paul says: Setting him at his right hand in the heavenly places, above all principality and power and virtue and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come; after a manifold exposition, when I had come to the offices of God's ministers, and was speaking of principalities and powers and virtues and dominations, I also added this: "It is necessary that they have subjects, both fearing them, and serving them, and those who are strengthened by their strength.

These distributions of offices shall be, not only in the present, but also in the age to come: so that through individual advances and honors, ascents and descents, one may either increase or decrease, and come to be under one power, virtue, principality, and domination or another." And after the example of an earthly king, and the whole description of the Palace, by which I was showing the diverse offices of God's ministrations, I added: "And do we suppose that God, the Lord of lords, and the King of them that reign, is content with but a single ministry?" Just as an Archangel is not so called, except one who is first among the Angels: so Principalities and Powers and Dominations are not so named, unless they have some subjects, and of a lower rank.

But if he thinks that I therefore follow Origen, because I set down in my exposition advances and honors, ascents and descents, increases and diminutions, let him know that it makes a great difference to say concerning Angels and Seraphim and Cherubim, that they become demons and men, which Origen affirms; and that the Angels themselves have been allotted among themselves diverse kinds of offices, which is not repugnant to the Church. Just as also among men the order of dignities is diverse according to the variety of labor, since a bishop and a presbyter, and every ecclesiastical rank, has its own order; and yet all are men: so also among Angels there are diverse merits, and yet all remain in angelic dignity: neither do men become Angels, nor again are Angels transformed into men.

The third place of reprehension is that, the Apostle saying: That he might show in the ages to come the abundant riches of his grace, in his kindness towards us in Christ Jesus, we set forth a threefold exposition. In the first, what seemed good to us; in the second, what Origen would object; in the third, what Apollinaris simply explained. If I did not set down their names, forgive my modesty: I ought not to carp at those whom I was in part imitating, and whose opinions I was translating into the Latin tongue. But, I said, whoever is a diligent reader will at once inquire, and will say. And again at the end, But another transfers this saying, that he might show in the ages to come the abundant riches of his grace, to that understanding. Behold, you will say, under the person of a diligent reader, you have expounded Origen's opinions.

I confess the error, I ought not to have said diligent, but blasphemous: which if I had done, and if by some prophecy I had known that you would pursue such trifles, I would have avoided even the words of calumny. A great crime indeed, if I called Origen a diligent reader, whose seventy books I have translated, whom I have extolled to the skies with praises; for which I was compelled, two years ago, to respond in a brief little book to your public panegyrics against me (Letter to Pammachius, written two years ago). You object, in your praises, that I called Origen the teacher of the Churches: and you think that I ought to be greatly afraid, if an enemy accuses me of having called him a diligent reader. We are wont to call even the most sparing traders, and thrifty servants, and troublesome tutors, and the shrewdest thieves, diligent.

And in the Gospel the steward of iniquity is said to have done certain things prudently: and, The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. And, The serpent was more subtle than all the beasts which the Lord God had made upon the earth.

The fourth place of reprehension holds the beginning of the second book, in which I set forth this testimony of Paul: For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles; and since the passage itself is manifest by itself, I will set down only that part of the explanation which lies open to calumny: “That Paul is a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the Gentiles can also be understood of martyrdom, in that, having been cast into chains at Rome, he sent this Epistle at that time when we have shown, in another place, that those to Philemon, and to the Colossians, and the Philippians were written.

Or certainly, because in very many places it is read that this body is called the bondage of the soul, by which, as if shut up, it is held in prison, we say that Paul was for that reason held by the bonds of the body, and did not return, and be with Christ, so that the preaching, being perfected among the Gentiles through him, might be fulfilled: although some introduce another sense in this passage, that Paul, predestined and sanctified from his mother’s womb for the preaching of the Gentiles before he was born, afterward received the bonds of the flesh.” And in this, as above, I set forth a threefold exposition. In the first, what seemed to me; in the second, what Origen asserted; in the third, what Apollinarius, going against his dogmas, held. Read the Greek Commentaries; and if you do not find it so, I will confess the crime. What is my sin in this passage? Surely this, for which I answered above: why did I not name those by whom these things were said?

It was superfluous to set down, for each testimony of the Apostle, the names of those whose Little Works I had signified in the Preface that I would translate. And yet, that the soul is said to be bound by the body, until it return to Christ, and in the glory of the resurrection exchange the corruptible and mortal body for incorruption and immortality, is not an absurd understanding. Whence also the Apostle says: Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Calling it the body of death, because it lies subject to vices and diseases and disturbances and death: until it rise with Christ in glory, and the clay, before fragile, be fired by the heat of the Holy Spirit into a most solid vessel: changing its glory, not its nature.

The fifth place is the strongest, in which, expounding that testimony of the Apostle, From whom the whole body, being joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love, I condensed Origen’s very lengthy exposition, which turns over the same meanings in various words, into a brief discourse, taking away nothing from his examples and assertions.

And when we had come to the end, we added this: “Therefore also in the restitution of all things, when the true physician Christ Jesus shall have come to heal the body of the whole Church, now scattered and torn, each one, according to the measure of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God (whom he is therefore said to know, because he had known him before, and afterward ceased to know him), shall receive his own place, and shall begin to be what he had been: yet in such a way that not, as in another heresy, all are placed in one condition, that is, all are reformed into Angels; but each member is made perfect according to its own measure and office. For example, that the fugitive Angel should begin to be what he was created; that man, who had been cast out of paradise, should be restored again to the cultivation of paradise,” and the rest.

I marvel that you, a most prudent man, did not understand the art of my exposition. “For when I say, yet in such a way that not, as in another heresy, all are placed in one condition, that is, all are reformed into Angels, I show both that the things about which I dispute are heretical, and that they differ from another heresy.” What then are the two heresies? One, which says that all rational creatures are reformed into Angels. The other, which asserts that in the restitution of the world each thing returns nearly to what it was created; for example, that since demons come from Angels, demons in turn become Angels again: and that the souls of men, as they were created, are reformed not into Angels, but into that for which they were created by God, so that both the just and sinners become equal.

Finally, that you may know that I did not set forth my own opinion, but compared the heresies with one another, both of which I had read in Greek, I finished my discussion with this ending: “Therefore, as we said above, these things are more obscure among us, because they are spoken μεταφορικῶς in Greek; and every metaphor, if translated word for word from one language into another, has the sense and shoots of the discourse choked, as it were, by certain thorns.” Unless you find these same words in the Greek, consider whatever was said to be mine.

The sixth objection, and the last, is said to be brought against me (if indeed the brother has forgotten nothing in between): why, interpreting that passage of the Apostle where he says: He who loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ doth the Church—after a simple exposition, I set down Origen’s question; in whose person, keeping his name silent, I said: “It can be objected to us, that the Apostle’s statement is not true, that no man ever hated his own flesh, since those laboring under jaundice, consumption, cancer, and dropsy prefer death to life, and hate their own bodies; and immediately I added what I myself thought: ‘Let the discourse rather be referred to a tropical understanding.’” When I say “tropical,” I teach that what is said is not true, but figured under the cloud of allegory.

Let us nonetheless set down the very words which are contained in Origen’s third book: “Let us say that the soul loves that flesh which is to see the salvation of God, and nourishes and cherishes it, instructing it with disciplines, feeding it with heavenly bread, and watering it with the blood of Christ: that, refreshed and made bright, it may be able with free course to follow its husband, and be weighed down by no burden of weakness. Beautifully also, in likeness to Christ nourishing and cherishing the Church, and saying to Jerusalem: How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not, souls also cherish their bodies, that this corruptible may put on incorruption, and being lifted up by the lightness of wings, may more easily be raised into the air.

Let us, therefore, also cherish our wives, and our souls our bodies: that wives may be brought back into husbands, and bodies into souls, and there be no diversity of sexes at all: but as among the Angels there is neither man nor woman; so also we, who are to be like the Angels, may even now begin to be what has been promised to us in the heavens.”

Above, we set forth the simple exposition which seemed to us to be in this testimony, saying: “As far as pertains to the simple understanding, we are now bidden, by the holy love enjoined between husband and wife, to nourish and cherish our spouses: that is, to supply them with food and clothing, and the things that are necessary.” This is our own opinion. Therefore all that follows thereafter, and can be objected to us, we show ought to be understood not as spoken from our own person, but from that of those who oppose. Which, though it might have been a brief and finished answer, and, as we said above, distorted even by the shadows of allegory, from what a thing is, into what it was not: nevertheless I will draw nearer, and inquire what displeases you in this discussion. Surely because I said that souls, as husbands, cherish their bodies as wives, that this corruptible may put on incorruption, and, being lifted up by the lightness of wings, may more easily be raised into the air.

When I say “that this corruptible may put on incorruption,” I do not change the nature of bodies, but increase their glory. Nor likewise does what follows, “being lifted up by the lightness of wings, may more easily be raised into the air”: he who takes on wings, that is, immortality, that he may fly more lightly to heaven, does not lose being what he was. But you will say, what moves me are the words that follow: “Let us, therefore, husbands, cherish our wives, and our souls our bodies, that both wives may be brought back into husbands, and bodies into souls, and there be no diversity of sexes at all; but as among the Angels there is neither man nor woman: so also we, who are to be like the Angels, may even now begin to be on earth what has been promised to us in the heavens.” They would rightly move you, unless, after the former words, I had said, let us begin even now to be what has been promised to us in the heavens.

When I say, let us begin here on earth to be this, I do not remove the nature of the sexes; but I take away lust, and the intercourse of husband and wife, the Apostle saying: The time is short: it remaineth, that they that have wives be as though they had none. And the Lord, when asked in the Gospel whose wife, of the seven brothers, she should be in the resurrection, said: Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God: for in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the Angels of God in heaven. And indeed, where there is chastity between man and woman, neither does the man begin to be, nor the woman: but, still placed in the body, they are changed into Angels: among whom there is neither man nor woman. Which is also said in another place by the same Apostle: As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female. For ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

But since my speech has now sailed past rough and craggy places, and we have repelled with full openness of countenance the charge of heresy that was flung at us, let us pass on to the other parts of that accusation, by which he strives to bite us. Of these the first is, that I am a slanderous man, a detractor of everyone, who always fixes his native tooth in my predecessors. Let him give one whose name I have criticized in my little works, or whom, after his manner, I have grazed with figured praise. But if I speak against the envious, and my pen's point has wounded Luscius Lavinius, or Asinius Pollio of the Cornelian family, if I remove from myself a man of petty, envious mind, and direct all my darts at one single stock, why does he divide these wounds among many? Why does he, by his impatience in replying, show that he is the one being attacked? He objects to me perjury, mixed with sacrilege, because in the book (Epist.

22, to Eustochium) in which I speak for the instruction of a virgin of Christ, I promised, while dreaming before the tribunal of the Judge, that I would never again devote myself to secular literature, and yet I sometimes recall that condemned learning. This surely is that Sallustian Calpurnius, who through the Great Orator raised for us no great question, to which we responded with a brief little book. Now what presses is that I must answer concerning the sacrilege and perjury of a dream. I said that I would not thereafter read secular literature: this is a pledge concerning the future, not an abolition of past memory. And how, you will say, do you retain what you do not reread for so long a time?

Again, if I should answer something out of the old books, and say, "it matters much to become accustomed to a thing in one's tender years" (Virgil, Georgics II): while I deny, I incur the charge, and while bringing forward testimony for myself, I am accused by this very fact by which I am defended. Doubtless now it must be woven into a long discourse, what the conscience of each individual proves. Which of us does not remember his own childhood? I certainly, that I may move you, a most severe man, to laughter, and that you may sometime imitate Crassus, who Lucilius says laughed once in his life, remember that as a boy I used to run through the little cells of the servants, that I spent a holiday in games, and was dragged as a captive from my grandmother's lap to the raging Orbilius.

And, what is more astonishing, now with hoary and balding head, I often seem to myself in dreams to have flowing hair, and, having put on the toga, to be declaiming some little controversial exercise before the rhetorician. And when I awake, I congratulate myself on being freed from the peril of speaking. Believe me, childhood recalls many things quite clearly. If you had learned letters, the jar of your talent would smell of that with which it was once steeped. No waters wash out the purple dyes of wool. Even asses and brute animals, however long the journey, know the turnings on the way back. Do you wonder if I have not forgotten Latin letters, when you learned Greek without a teacher? The elements of dialectic taught me the seven modes of conclusions; what ἀξίωμα signifies, which we can call a "pronouncement"; how, without a verb and a noun, no sentence is formed, the steps of the sorites, the subtleties of the liar's paradox, the deceits of sophisms.

I can swear that since I left school I have never at all read these things again. So I shall have to drink from the Lethean flood, according to the fables of the poets, lest I be accused of knowing what I once learned. Come now, you who accuse me of little knowledge, and seem to yourself a little man of letters and a Rabbi, answer, why you have dared to write certain things, and to translate the most eloquent Gregory with equal splendor of style. Whence do you have such copiousness of words, such brightness of sentiments, such variety of translations, you who scarcely tasted rhetoric with your first lips in adolescence? Either I am mistaken, or you secretly read Cicero. And that is why you are so eloquent, and charge me with the crime of reading him, so that you alone among ecclesiastical writers might glory in a river of eloquence.

Though you seem rather to follow the philosophers, the thorns of Cleanthes, and the twisted arguments of Chrysippus, not from an art which you do not know, but from the greatness of your natural talent. And since the Stoics claim logic for themselves, and you despise the ravings of that science, in this respect you are an Epicurean: you do not ask how you speak, but what you speak. For what does it matter to you if another does not understand what you mean to say, since you speak not to everyone, but to your own people? Finally, I too, rereading your writings, though sometimes I do not understand what you say, and think I am reading Heraclitus, yet I do not grieve, nor am I sorry for my slowness: for in reading I suffer what you suffer in writing.

Why Rufinus has slandered Jerome.—I would say these things, if I had promised anything while awake. But now, by a new kind of impudence, he objects to me my dream. Would that the crowding of the place, and the gathering of the saints from the whole world, allowed me to read the divine Scriptures! I have no time for meditating on outside matters over so long a span. But nevertheless let him who accuses me on account of a dream hear the voices of the Prophets, that dreams are not to be trusted, since neither does the adultery of a dream lead me to Tartarus, nor does the crown of martyrdom lift me to heaven. How many times have I seen myself dead, and laid in a tomb! How many times have I flown over the earth, and crossed mountains and seas by swimming through the air? Let him then force me not to live, or to have wings on my sides, since the mind is often deluded by wandering images.

How many rich men in dreams, with eyes suddenly opened, are beggars? Men athirst drink rivers; and, awakened, burn with dry throats. You exact from me a pledge concerning a dream: I will summon you more truly and more strictly. Have you done all that you promised in baptism? Has each of us fulfilled whatever the name of monk demands? Beware, I ask, lest through your own beam you see my splinter. I speak unwillingly, and grief compels my reluctant tongue into words. The things you fabricate about me while awake are not enough for you, unless you also accuse my dreams. You have such curiosity about my acts, that you scrutinize what I did or said while asleep. I pass over the things by which, speaking against me, you have disgraced your own profession; the things you have done in both word and deed for the degradation of all Christians. I proclaim this one thing, and will warn again and again.

You seek a horned beast: and did I not fear that saying of the Apostle, "Revilers shall not possess the kingdom of God"; and, "Biting one another, you are consumed by one another"; you would even now feel that from a small and deceitful concord a great discord has arisen in the world. What good does it do you to heap up curses against us among both acquaintances and strangers? Is it because we are not Origenists, and do not know that we sinned in heaven, that we are accused of being sinners on earth? And so you, revived into concord, that I might not be allowed to speak against heretics, lest, if I should describe them, you think yourself the one attacked? As long as I did not refuse your praise, you followed me as a master, called me brother and colleague, and confessed me catholic in all things.

After I did not acknowledge your praises, and judged myself unworthy of so great a man's commendation, immediately you turn your pen, and vituperate all that you had before praised, bringing forth from the same mouth both sweet and bitter. Do you sense what I am keeping silent, that I do not lend words to my boiling heart? And that with the Psalmist I say: "Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth, and a door of safety about my lips. Incline not my heart to words of malice". And elsewhere: "While the sinner stood against me, I was dumb, and was humbled, and kept silence from good things". And again: "I became as a man that heareth not, and that hath no reproofs in his mouth"? But for me the Lord will answer as avenger, who says through the Prophet, "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, saith the Lord". And in another place: "Thou sat and spoke against thy brother, and against the son of thy mother thou didst lay a scandal.

These things thou hast done, and I was silent; thou thoughtest, unjustly, that I should be like to thee: I will reprove thee, and set before thy face"; that you may see in yourself condemned what you falsely charge in others.

I hear besides that it is objected to me by Chrysogonus, his follower, why in baptism I said all sins are forgiven, and that, when a twice-married man has died, a new man rises in Christ; and that priests of this sort exist in the churches in some number. To him I will reply in a brief word: they have the little book (Epist. To Oceanus), which they call into question: let him answer it, let him overturn it by his own disputation, and refute writings with writings. Why does he weigh out hollow words with a severe brow and drawn and wrinkled nostrils, and feign holiness before the ignoble common crowd with pretended rigor? Let him hear us again proclaiming that the old Adam wholly dies in the font, and the new man rises with Christ in baptism: that the man of dust perishes, and one born of heaven is born.

We say these things, not because we ourselves, by Christ's favor, are bound by this question, but, being asked by the brethren what seemed to us, we answered, prejudging no one to follow what he wishes, nor overturning another's decree by our opinion. For we do not seek the priesthood, we who lie hidden in our cells; nor, humility condemned, do we hasten to buy episcopacy with gold; nor do we wish, with rebellious mind, to slay one chosen bishop by God; nor, by favoring heretics, do we teach ourselves to be heretics. We have no money, nor do we wish to have any: "Having food and raiment, with these we are content"; ever singing that verse about him who ascends the mountain of the Lord: "He that hath not put out his money to usury, nor taken gifts against the innocent. He that doth these things shall not be moved for ever". Therefore he who does not do these things has already fallen for ever.

Thus far, concerning the charges—or rather, in defense against the charges—which a deceitful praiser once heaped upon me, and which his disciples more resolutely urge, I have answered, not as I ought, but as I could, with moderated grief. For my purpose is not so much to accuse others, as to defend myself. I will come now to his Apology, by which he strives to satisfy holy Anastasius, bishop of the city of Rome, and, in defense of himself, again constructs slander against me; and he loves me so much that, caught up in the whirlwind and plunged into the depths, he attacks my foot above all, so that he may either be freed with me, or perish with me.

He says that he first answers the rumors by which his faith is disparaged there at Rome, being a man most approved, both in faith and in the love of God. And that, unless after thirty years, restored to his parents, he were unwilling to abandon those whom he had seen so late, lest he should be thought inhuman or hard, and, more feeble from the labor of so long a journey, too weak to undertake the labors again, he himself would have wished to come. And because he did not do this, he sent against his detractors a staff of letters, which that man might hold in his right hand and drive off the raging dogs against him. If he is approved by all, and especially by the very bishop to whom he writes, in faith and in the love of God: how is he bitten and gnawed at Rome, and how does the report of the reputation sought for him grow more frequent?

Then, what humility is it, to call himself approved in faith and in the love of God, when the Apostles ask, "Lord, increase our faith"; and hear, "If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed". And to Peter himself it is said, "O thou of little faith, why didst thou doubt?" What shall I say of charity, which is greater than both faith and hope: and which Paul wishes for rather than presumes to have: without which even blood shed in martyrdom, and a body given to the flames, has no crown of reward? Both of these he so claims for himself, that nevertheless he has detractors against him: who, unless driven off by the renowned pontiff's staff, do not cease to bark.

But this is truly ridiculous, that he boasts of having returned to his parents after thirty years—a man who has neither father nor mother; and those whom he left living as a young man, he now, as an old man, longs for as dead: unless perhaps by "parents," in a military and vulgar manner of speech, he names his relatives and connections, whom, because he does not wish to abandon, lest he be thought inhuman or hard, he therefore, having left his fatherland, lives at Aquileia. His most approved faith is in peril at Rome, and here he, sluggish and a little weary, after thirty years, cannot come by the softest road of the Flaminian Way in a carriage; and so he pretends the weariness of a long journey, as though he had been running continuously for thirty years, or as though, sitting at Aquileia for two years, he were worn out by the labor of a past journey.

Let us pick apart the rest, and let us set down the very words of his letter: "Although, then, our faith, at the time of the persecution of the heretics, when we were living in the holy Church of Alexandria, was proved amid the imprisonments and exiles which were inflicted for the faith." I marvel that he did not add: "Bound as a prisoner of Jesus Christ, and I was delivered from the lion's mouth, and at Alexandria I fought with beasts, and I have finished the course, I have kept the faith, there remains for me the crown of righteousness." What exiles, what prisons does this man name? I am ashamed of so barefaced a falsehood; as if prisons and exiles were inflicted without judges' sentences. Yet I wish to know these very prisons, and of what provinces he claims to have sustained the exiles. And surely, if he has an abundance of many prisons and endless exiles, he can name at least one.

Let him produce for us the acts of his confession, which up to now we have not known; that among the other Martyrs of Alexandria we may also recite the deeds of this man, and that against his barkers he may be able to say: "From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus".

"Yet even if there is now anyone who wishes either to test our faith, or to hear it, or to learn it, let him know that concerning the Trinity we believe thus," and the rest. Above, against your dogs, you hand the bishop a staff, that armed with it he may walk on for you. Now, as though in doubt, you say: "If there is anyone who wishes to test our faith"; again you waver, though the barking of many has reached even to you. I will not for the moment discuss your turns of phrase, which you yourself despise and disdain; I will answer only to the sense. One thing is asked of you, and you satisfy a different matter. Against the dogmas of Arius you had already fought at Alexandria in prisons and exiles, not with voice, but with blood. Now a calumny concerning Origen's heresy is stirred up against you. I do not want you to cure with medicine wounds that are already sound. You say the Trinity is of one Godhead.

Since the whole world now believes this, I think even the demons confess that the Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary, and took on flesh of human nature, and a soul. If I ask something more closely, you will call it contentious. If you say that the Son of God took on flesh and soul of human nature, I beg you, answer without indignation: that soul which Jesus took on—did it exist before he was born of Mary? Or was it created together with the body at the very virginal origin, which was born of the Holy Spirit, or, the body already being formed in the womb, was it then made and sent down at once from heaven? Which of the three you hold, I wish to know. If it existed before he was born of Mary, then the soul of Jesus was not yet, and it was doing something, and afterwards, because of the merits of its virtues, it became his soul.

If it took its origin by traduction, then there is one condition for human souls—which we confess to be eternal—and for the souls of brute animals, which are dissolved together with the body. But if, the body being formed, it is created and sent at once, confess it simply, and free us from scruple.

You say none of these things: but, occupied with other matters, you abuse our simplicity, and with tricks and pomp of words you do not let us cling to the question. What, you will say, was not the question about the resurrection of the flesh, and the punishments of the devil? I confess it. Then answer briefly and plainly. I do not ask what you write, that the same flesh rises in which we live, with no member amputated, nor any part of the body cut off—these are your own words—but I ask, what Origen denies, whether they are raised in the same sex in which the bodies died: and Mary rises as Mary, John as John: or whether, with the sex mixed and confounded, one is neither man nor woman, but both, or neither?

And whether the bodies themselves remain incorrupt, and immortal, and, as you cleverly forewarn, according to the Apostle, spiritual forever: and not only the bodies, but the flesh and the blood poured through the veins and irrigating the bones, which Thomas touched: or whether indeed they are gradually resolved into nothing, and drawn back to the four elements out of which they were compacted? These things you ought either to have stated, or to have denied, and not to say what Origen slyly admits; as though mocking fools and children, "with no member amputated, nor any part of the body cut off." As if this were what we feared, that we should rise without nose and ears, and that with genitals cut off and severed, a city of eunuchs should be founded in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Further, concerning the devil he tempers his opinion thus: "We say also that there will be a future judgment, in which judgment each one will receive the things proper to the body, according as he has done, whether good or evil. But if men are to receive according to their works, how much more the devil also, who is the cause of sin for all!" Concerning whom we hold what is written in the Gospel: that the devil himself, and all his angels, together with those who do his works—that is, who slander their brothers—will obtain, equally with him, the inheritance of eternal fire. If, therefore, anyone denies that the devil is consigned to eternal fires, let him receive a portion with him of eternal fire, that he may perceive what he denied. Let us go over the points one by one. "We say," he states, "there will be a future judgment; in which judgment," and so forth.

I had resolved to be silent about the faults of his words; but since his disciples marvel at their teacher's eloquence, I will touch briefly on a few. He had said "future judgment"; but the cautious fellow feared to say only "in which," and put "in which judgment"; lest, if he had not repeated "judgment" a second time, we, forgetting what went before, should think he meant an ass instead of a judgment. That too which he adds afterward, "who slander their brothers, will obtain, equally with him, the inheritance of eternal fire," is of the same elegance. For who ever heard of "obtaining" fires, and "enjoying" torments? But the Greek fellow seems to me to have wished to translate himself, and, for what among them is called κληρονομήσουσιν, and among us can be said in one word, "will inherit," to have said more elaborately and ornately, "will obtain by inheritance." His whole speech teems with trifles and improprieties of this sort. But let us return to the sense.

A mighty lance strikes the devil, who is the cause of sin for all, if, like a man, he is to render account for his works, and, together with his angels, is to obtain by inheritance eternal fire. For this was lacking—that while men are subjected to torment, he should obtain the eternal fires which he had so long desired. And you seem to me in this passage to bring a false charge against the devil, and to accuse the accuser of all with false accusations. For you say, "who is the cause of sin for all"; and while you refer the crimes to him, you free men from blame, and take away the freedom of the will, though the Saviour says that from our heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnesses, blasphemies. And again concerning Judas we read in the Gospel: "After the morsel Satan entered into him": who before the morsel had sinned of his own will, and was not moved to repentance either by the humility or by the clemency of the Saviour.

Whence the Apostle says: "Whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme". And in another place: "I have delivered such a one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved". He delivered them to Satan, as to a torturer, for punishment, who before they were delivered had blasphemed of their own will. And David says: "Cleanse me, Lord, from my hidden faults, and spare thy servant from those that are another's": briefly signifying both the error of his own will, and the incitements of vices. In Ecclesiastes also we read: "If the spirit of one having power ascend upon thy heart, leave not thy place". From which it plainly appears that, if we give place to one ascending, it is we who have sinned by giving place, and by not casting down headlong the enemy climbing the walls.

As for your imprecation upon the brethren—that is, upon your accusers—of eternal fires with the devil, you seem to me not so much to press down the brethren as to lift up the devil, since he is to be punished with the same fires as Christian men. But the eternal fires, which Origen is accustomed to understand, I think does not escape you—namely, the conscience of sins, and the inward repentance burning the heart. Of which Isaiah also speaks: "Their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched". And to Babylon it is written: "Thou hast coals of fire, thou shalt sit upon them: these shall be for thy help" (numbering). And in the Psalm the penitent hears: "What shall be given to thee, or what shall be added to thee, for a deceitful tongue?

Sharp arrows of the mighty, with desolating coals" (sic): so that the arrows of God's precepts (of which the Prophet speaks elsewhere: "I was turned in my anguish, whilst the thorn is fastened in me") may wound and pierce the deceitful tongue, and make in it a desolation of sins. That testimony too, in which the Lord speaks: "I am come to send fire on the earth, and what will I but that it be kindled?", he interprets thus: "I desire all to do penance, and to burn away vices and sins by the Holy Spirit. For I am he of whom it is written: 'Our God is a consuming fire'". It is, then, no great thing to say this of the devil, which is also prepared for men.

You ought rather (to avoid the suspicion of the devil's salvation) to have said: "Thou art become destruction, and thou shalt not be for ever"; and, in the person of the Lord speaking to Job about the devil: "Behold his hope shall fail him, and he shall be cast down in the sight of all" (sic). "Not as one cruel will I stir him up. For who can resist my face? Who hath first given to me, that I should repay him? All things that are under heaven are mine. I will not spare him," and words powerful and framed for entreaty. Yet these things can perhaps be excused as those of a simple man; and though they do not escape the learned, among the unlearned they carry the appearance of innocence.

What follows concerning the state of souls cannot be excused at all. For he says: "I hear also that questions have been raised concerning the soul: of which matter, whether the complaint ought to be received or rejected, do you judge. But if it is also asked what I myself think about it, I confess that on this question I have read various things among very many writers. I have read some saying that souls too are diffused together with the body through the transmission of human seed: and they confirmed this with what proofs they could. This I think was the view among the Latins of Tertullian, or Lactantius, and perhaps some others too. Others assert that, the bodies being formed in the womb, God daily makes and infuses souls. Others say that they were made long ago—that is, at the time when God created all things out of nothing—and now, by his own judgment, he dispenses that they be born into the body. This Origen holds, and some other Greeks as well.

But I, having read each of these views (I speak with God as witness), because up to the present I hold nothing certain and definite on this question; but I leave it to God to know what the truth is, if he should deign to reveal it to anyone. Yet I do not deny that I have read each of these views, and I confess that I am still ignorant of the matter: except for this, which the Church clearly hands down, that God is the maker both of souls and of bodies."

Before I discuss the sense, I will marvel at Theophrastus's words: "I hear," he says, "that questions have been raised concerning the soul: of which matter, whether the complaint ought to be received, or rejected, do you judge." If questions concerning the state of the soul have been raised at Rome, what is this "complaint" or "grievance," which it is left to the judgment of the bishops whether it ought to be received? Unless perhaps he thinks that "question" and "complaint" mean the same thing, because he found a figure of this sort in the Commentaries of Caper. Then he sets down: "I have read some saying that souls too are diffused together with the body through the transmission of human seed, and they confirmed this with what proofs they could." I ask, what is this license of figures? What confusion of moods and tenses? "I have read some saying ... they confirmed with what proofs they could." And in what follows: "Others assert that, the bodies being formed in the womb, God daily makes new souls, and infuses them.

Others, that they were made long ago—that is, at the time when God created all things out of nothing—and now, by his own judgment, dispenses that they be born into the body." And here too the order is most beautiful. "Others," he says, "assert this or that: others, that they were made long ago—that is, at the time when God created all things out of nothing—and now, by his own judgment, dispenses that they be born into the body." He speaks so vapidly and confusedly, that I labor more in rebuking than he did in writing. At the end he set down: "But I, having read each of these views"—and while the judgment still hangs, as though he had brought forward something new, he adds: "Yet I do not deny that I have read each of these views, and I confess that I am still ignorant."

O unhappy souls, wounded by so many spears of vices! I do not think they labored so much, according to Origen's error, when they fell from heaven to earth and were clothed with gross bodies, as now they are torn this way and that by words and opinions colliding with each other; not to mention the κακέμφατον by which souls are said to be diffused by the propagation of human seed. I know that among Christians faults of speech are not usually reproved; but from a few instances I wanted to show what rashness it is to teach what you do not know, to write what you are ignorant of: so that we might likewise require a similar prudence in matters of sense. He sends a letter, that is, the most sturdy staff, with which the bishop of the city of Rome may be armed: and in the very question for which the dogs bark, he says he does not know what is being asked.

If he is ignorant of that on account of which calumny is being stirred up against him, what need is there to send an Apology, which contains not a defense of itself, but a confession of ignorance? This is not to allay the suspicions of men, but to sow them. He sets forth three opinions on the state of souls, and concluding at the end says: "I do not deny that I have read each of them, and I confess that I still do not know." You would think him Arcesilas or Carneades, who declare all things uncertain, though he even surpasses them in caution. For they, unable to bear the odium of all the philosophers because they took truth away from life, discovered probabilities, so as to temper their ignorance of things with a plausible assertion; but this man calls himself uncertain, and out of three opinions confesses he does not know at all what is true.

If this was what he was going to answer, what reasoning drove him to make so great a Pontiff a witness to his own ignorance? No doubt this is that weariness by reason of which, worn out by a thirty years' journey, he could not manage to come to Rome. How much else we do not know, and yet we do not seek witnesses to our own ignorance! Concerning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; concerning the birth of the Lord the Savior, about which Isaiah cries out: Who shall declare his generation? He speaks boldly, and claims for his own knowledge a mystery unknown to all past ages: and this alone he does not know, the ignorance of which is a scandal to all. He knows how the Virgin bore God; and he does not know how he himself was born.

He confesses the Lord to be the creator of souls and bodies, whether souls existed before bodies, or whether they are born together with the beginnings of bodies, or whether they are sent into bodies already formed and shaped in the womb. In all these we know the Lord as author. Nor is the question now whether God, or someone else, made them: but out of the three opinions which he has set forth, he says he does not know which of them is true. See lest it be objected to you at once, that you confess ignorance of the three for this reason, lest you be compelled to condemn one: and that you spare Tertullian and Lactantius for this reason, lest you have to slay Origen along with them. As far as memory suggests, unless I am mistaken, I do not recall having read that Lactantius said the soul is συσπειρομένην (coiled together).

But as for you, who write that you have read it, say in which book you read it, lest you seem to calumniate him, now dead, as you did me, asleep. But in this too you proceed hesitantly and cautiously. For you say: "I think that among the Latins Tertullian held this view, or Lactantius, and perhaps some others also." You not only doubt about the state of souls, but you also merely think about the opinions of authors: and yet there is a difference. About souls you are openly ignorant, and you confess your ignorance; about authors you say you know in such a way that you rather suppose than assert. Only concerning Origen you have no doubt. For you say, "This is what Origen holds." I will ask you: does he hold it rightly, or wrongly? "I do not know," you say. Why then, by dispatching couriers and very frequent messengers, do you try to teach me, so that I may know what you yourself do not know?

And lest perhaps I should not believe your ignorance, and should think that you are cunningly keeping silent about what you know, you swear with God as witness that up to the present you hold nothing certain and definite on this question; and you leave it to God to know what is true, and whether he will deign to reveal it to anyone. Through so many ages does no one seem to you to have been worthy, to whom the Lord revealed something on this question? Not a patriarch, not a prophet, not an apostle, not a martyr? Not even to you, when you were dwelling in prisons and exiles, were mysteries of this kind ever disclosed? The Lord says in the Gospel, "Father, I have revealed thy name to men". He who revealed the Father was silent about the state of souls: and do you marvel if scandals of the brethren are stirred up against you, since you swear that you do not know what the churches of Christ profess that they know?

Having set forth his faith, or rather his confession of ignorance, he passes to another matter; and strives to excuse himself for having translated the books Περὶ Ἀρχῶν into Latin. And he writes these very words: "Indeed, since I hear that a dispute has arisen from this too, that certain things of Origen's, at the request of the brethren, I translated from Greek into Latin, I think that everyone understands that these things are being blamed out of pure malice alone. For if there is something displeasing in the author, why is it twisted against the translator? Just as it is found in the Greek, so I was asked to show it to the Latins. I gave Latin words only to Greek meanings. Whether, therefore, there is some praise in those meanings, it is not mine: or if there is blame, likewise it is not mine." "I hear," he says, "that a dispute has arisen from this too." How cleverly he calls his own accusation a "dispute"!

"That certain things of Origen's, at the request of the brethren, I translated from Greek into Latin." What are those "certain things"? Do they have no name? Are you silent? The accusers' pamphlets speak. "I think," he says, "that everyone understands that these things are blamed out of pure malice alone." For what malice? Do they perhaps envy your eloquence? Or have you done what no man was ever able to do? Behold, I too have translated many works of Origen: and besides you, no one envies or slanders me. "For if," he says, "there is something displeasing in the Author, why is it twisted against the translator? Just as it is found in the Greek, I was asked to show it to the Latins.

Whether, therefore, there is some praise in those meanings, it is not mine: or if there is blame, likewise it is not mine." And you marvel if men think ill of you, when concerning open blasphemies you say: "If there is something which displeases in the author." Everything that is said in those books is displeasing to all: and you alone doubt, and complain that what you praised in the Preface of your translation is being twisted against the translator. You were asked to translate it into Latin just as it stood in the Greek. Would that you had done what you pretend you were asked to do! You would now be subject to no envy. If you had kept faith with your translation, there would have been no necessity for me to overturn a false interpretation with a true interpretation.

Your conscience knows what you added, what you removed, what you altered in either direction, as it seemed good to you: and after this you dare to say that both the good and the bad ought to be imputed not to you, but to the author. And oppressed by ill will you still measure your words; and, walking as it were with a step suspended over ears of grain, you speak. "Whether there is praise in those meanings, or blame." You do not dare to defend, and yet you do not wish to condemn. Choose one of the two you like, the choice is given to you: if your translation is good, praise it; if bad, condemn it. But he excuses himself, and adds another twist.

For he says: "Indeed I also added something else, as I indicated in my little Preface; that, as far as I could, I omitted certain things: yet those which came to me as suspicious, as though not so said by Origen himself, but seeming to have been inserted by others, because I had read on the same subjects, in other places of the same author, things said in a catholic manner." Marvelous eloquence, and varied with Attic flowers: "Indeed I also"; and "which came to me as suspicious." I marvel that he dared to send such verbal monstrosities to Rome. You would think his tongue fettered, and bound with inextricable knots, scarcely bursting into human sound. But let me return to the matter at hand.

Who gave you this license, to cut away much from the translation? You were asked to translate the Greek into Latin, not to emend it: to bring forth another's words, not to compose your own. That you did not do what you were asked, by cutting away very many things, you confess. And would that you had cut away the evil things, and had not, in support of the evil things, placed many things of your own! Of which I will bring forward one, so that from this the rest may be recognized. In the first book Περὶ Ἀρχῶν, where Origen with sacrilegious tongue blasphemed, saying that the Son does not see the Father, you even supply reasons, as though in the person of him who wrote it, and add a σχόλιον of Didymus the interpreter, in which he, with wasted labor, attempts to defend another's error, saying that Origen indeed spoke well: but we simple men, and tame Ennian folk, can understand neither his wisdom, nor yours, who translated him.

Your Preface, which you cite by name, and in which you adorn me with wondrous praises, makes you guilty of the worst translation. For you say that you cut away many things from the Greek, though you are silent about what you added. What you cut away, were they bad or good? Bad, surely. What you kept, good or bad? Good, surely. For you could not have translated bad things. Therefore you cut away the bad and left the good? No one doubts it. But it is proven that almost all the things that were translated are bad. Therefore whatever bad thing I shall show in the translation will be imputed to you, who translated it as good. It is a different matter, if you, an unjust censor guilty of the same crime, expel some from the senate, and keep others in the curia. But you say, "I could not change everything; but only those things which I supposed to have been added by heretics, I believed had to be cut away by me." Beautifully said.

If you cut away what you thought had been added by heretics, then what you left belongs to him whom you translated; answer, whether they are good or bad. Bad things you could not have translated. For once you cut away what had been added by heretics. Unless perhaps you had to cut away the evils of the heretics, and translate Origen's errors whole into Latin. Tell me, then, why did you translate Origen's bad things into Latin: to expose the author of evil, or to praise him? If you expose him, why do you praise him in the preface? If you praise him, you are proven a heretic. It remains that you brought them forth as good things. If all these things are proven bad, then the Author and the Translator will be guilty of one and the same crime, and that sentence will be fulfilled: You saw a thief, and ran with him: and you cast your lot with adulterers. There is no need to make a plain matter doubtful by argumentation.

As for what follows, let him answer, whence arose his suspicion that these things were added by heretics? "Because," he says, "I had read on the same subjects, in other places of the same author, things said in a catholic manner."

Let us see, what is first, how he arrived in order at the second point. Among the many evils of Origen, I prove these to be most heretical: that the Son of God is a creature; that the Holy Spirit is a minister; that there are innumerable worlds, succeeding one another through eternal ages; that angels were turned into the souls of men; that the soul of the Savior existed before it was born of Mary, and that this is the one who, "being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God", "but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant"; that the resurrection of our bodies will be such that they will not have the same members; because, the offices of the members ceasing, the superfluous members will be done away with; and that the bodies themselves, thin and spiritual, will gradually vanish, and be dissipated into thin air, and into nothing; that at the restitution of all things, when the principal indulgence shall come, the Cherubim and Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Archangels, Angels, the Devil, demons, and the souls of all men, both Christians and Jews and Gentiles, will be of one condition and measure.

And when they have arrived at the form and balance of equity, and the rational creatures, having laid aside all the dregs of bodies, a new army of the people returning from the exile of the world shall show itself, then again, from another beginning, another world shall be made, and other bodies, with which souls falling from heaven shall be clothed, so that we must fear lest we who are now men should afterward be born as women; and she who is today a virgin might then perhaps be a prostitute. These things I teach to be heretical in Origen's books: do you show in what work of his you have read things contrary to these.

I do not want you to say, "Which I had read said in a catholic manner on the same subjects, in other places of the same author"; lest you send me off to his six thousand books, which you accuse the blessed Pope Epiphanius of having read; but name the places themselves: nor will even this suffice for me, unless you produce the same statements word for word. Origen is not foolish, and I know it; he cannot contradict himself. Therefore from this reckoning that sum arises: that what you cut away was not the heretics', but Origen's own, whose evils you therefore translated because you thought them good; and both the good and the bad of his must be imputed to you, since you approved his writings in the Prologue.

There follows in the same Apology: « I am neither a defender of Origen, nor an assertor, nor his first translator. Others before me did this same work: I too did it last, at the request of the brethren. If it is forbidden, let it not be done; the prohibition ought to be observed for the future. If those are blamed who did it before the prohibition, let the blame begin with the first. » At last he vomited forth what he wished, and all the swelling of his mind broke out into hatred of my accusation. Where he translates the books περὶ Ἀρχῶν, he says he is following me: where he is accused for having done this, he sets up my example; and whether secure or in peril, he cannot live without me. Let him hear then what he pretends not to know. No one objects to you that you translated Origen—otherwise Hilary and Ambrose would be held guilty of this same charge—but that, having translated heretical matter, you confirmed it by the praise of your Preface.

I myself, whom you call to account, so translated seventy of his Homilies, and some of the Tomes, that I might both remove the evils in the translation of the good parts, and openly, in the books περὶ Ἀρχῶν, show, in order to refute your translation, what the reader should avoid. Do you wish to render Origen into Latin? You have many of his homilies and tomes, in which a moral topic is treated, and the obscure places of Scripture are opened up. Translate these; give these to those who ask. Why does your first labor begin with infamy? Why, when about to translate heretical matter, do you put forward in its defense, as it were, the book of a martyr, and pour into Roman ears that which, once translated, the whole world shuddered at?

Or certainly, if you translate it for this reason, that you might convict him as a heretic, change nothing from the Greek, and attest this very thing in your preface—which most prudently Pope Anastasius, in the letter which he writes against you to Bishop John, set forth in his own words, freeing me, who did this, and accusing you, who refused to do it. And lest perhaps you should deny this too, I have appended his example: so that if you do not wish to hear a brother admonishing you, you may hear a bishop condemning (or, as some read, accusing) you.

You say that you are neither a defender nor an assertor of Origen: now I will bring forward for you your own book, of which, in that notorious little preface to your celebrated work, you speak in these words: « The cause of this diversity I have set forth more fully for you in the Apologeticum which Pamphilus wrote in his books, having added a very short treatise, in which, by evident proofs, as I think, I have shown that his books have been corrupted in a great many places by heretics and ill-disposed persons; and especially those which you now demand that I translate, that is, the περὶ Ἀρχῶν. » Was not the defense of Origen by Eusebius, or as you would have it, by Pamphilus, sufficient for you, unless, thinking that less had been said by them than was needed, you, as though wiser and more learned, should add to it?

It would be a long task, were I willing to insert your whole book into this work, and, setting out its chapters one by one, to answer each—showing what error of statement, what assertion of falsehoods, what inconsistency in the very texture of the words it contains. Wherefore, avoiding the tedium of a rambling disputation, and compressing my words into a narrow compass, I will reply only to the general sense. As soon as he leaves the harbor, he runs his ship aground. For, referring to the Apology of the martyr Pamphilus (which we have shown to be the work of Eusebius, the prince of the Arians), of which he had said, "As best I could, or as the matter required, I have set it forth in Latin speech," he added: « This is what I wish you to be reminded of, man of desires, Macarius: that you should know that this rule of faith, which we have set forth above from his books, is such as ought to be embraced and held.

For in all these it is clearly shown that a catholic sense is present. » Although he has removed much from Eusebius's book, and has strained to change for the better what concerns the Son and the Holy Spirit, yet many scandals are found in it, and most manifest blasphemies, which he—pronouncing them catholic—will not be able to deny as his own. Eusebius says—or rather, as you would have it, Pamphilus—in this volume, that the Son is the minister of the Father: that the Holy Spirit is not of the same substance as the Father and the Son: that the souls of men fell from heaven: and that, in this state which we now are, changed from angels, at the restoration of all things, angels, demons, and men will be equal; and many other things equally impious and wicked, which it would be a crime even to repeat.

What will the defender of Origen and translator of Pamphilus do? If in those things which he has emended there is such blasphemy, how great must be the sacrilege contained in those which he pretends were falsified by heretics? He suspects the cause of this opinion to be that a man who was neither foolish nor mad could not have said things contradictory to himself. And lest perchance we should think that he wrote various things at different times, and published contrary things according to his age, he added: « What are we to make of it, that sometimes in the same passages, and, so to speak, in almost the very next chapter, a sentence of contrary meaning is found inserted? Could he, in the same work, in the same book, and sometimes, as we have said, in the very next chapter, have forgotten himself?

For example, that he who had said above that it is nowhere found in the whole of Scripture where the Holy Spirit is said to have been made or created, should immediately afterward add that the Holy Spirit was made among the other creatures? Or again, that he who designated the Father and the Son as of one substance, which in Greek is called ὁμοούσιον, should, in the very next chapters, be able to say that he whom, a little before, he had declared to be born of the very nature of God the Father, was of another substance, and was created? »

These are his own words; he cannot deny them. I do not want you to say: "For example, as he who had said above"; but name the book itself, where he first spoke well, and afterward ill: where, writing that the Holy Spirit and the Son are of the substance of God the Father, he immediately afterward asserted them to be creatures. Do you not know that I possess all of Origen's works? That I have read very many of them? To the people, tinsel; I know you within, and under your skin. (Persius, Sat. 3.) The most learned Eusebius (I said most learned, not catholic, lest, according to your usual habit, you fabricate a slander against me on this point too) in six volumes does nothing else but show that Origen belonged to his own faith, that is, to Arian perfidy. And he gives many examples, and proves this consistently. In what dream, then, in the Alexandrian prison, was it revealed to you, that you should pretend as falsified what he professes to be true?

But perhaps here, as an Arian, he drew what was added by the heretics into an occasion for his own error, lest he alone should be thought to have held wrong opinions against the Church. What will you answer on behalf of Didymus, who is certainly catholic on the Trinity? Whose book on the Holy Spirit we ourselves have translated into the Latin tongue. Certainly he could not have agreed with those things which were added by heretics in Origen's works; and in the very books περὶ Ἀρχῶν, which you have translated, he dictated brief little commentaries, in which he does not deny that what was written was written by Origen, but tries to persuade us that we simple men cannot understand what is said, and in what sense it ought to be taken in a good part. This, at least, concerning the Son and the Holy Spirit. But in other doctrines, both Eusebius and Didymus most openly concede to Origen's opinions, and defend as catholic and pious what all the Churches reprove.

Let us see, nevertheless, by what arguments he strives to prove that Origen's writings were corrupted by heretics. « Clement, » he says, « the disciple of the Apostles, who after the Apostles was bishop of the Roman Church and a martyr, published books which are called ἀναγνωρισμὸς, that is, Recognition, in which, although in the person of Peter the Apostle a doctrine as it were truly apostolic is set forth in very many places, yet in some places the dogma of Eunomius is so inserted that nothing else than Eunomius himself seems to be disputing, asserting that the Son of God was created out of nothing. » And after other things which it would be tedious to write out: « What, I ask, » he says, « is to be thought of this, that an apostolic man should have written heretical things?

Or is it rather to be believed that perverse men, in support of their own dogmas, have inserted, under the names of holy men, as things more easily to be believed, things which those men are to be believed neither to have held nor to have written? » He also writes that Clement, presbyter of the Alexandrian Church, a catholic man, sometimes in his books calls the Son of God created: and that Dionysius, bishop of the city of Alexandria, a most learned man, disputing against Sabellius in four volumes, slips into the Arian dogma.

And by these examples he aims at this: to testify that not the ecclesiastical and catholic men held wrong views, but that their writings were corrupted by heretics, and he concludes at last, saying: « Concerning Origen too, in whom likewise, as in those mentioned above, a certain diversity is found, let it not suffice to think what is thought or understood of men already prejudged as catholic, lest a like excuse should suffice for a like case. » If it is granted that whatever harmful thing is found in books has been corrupted by others, nothing will belong to those under whose names it is transmitted; but it will be attributed to those by whom it is said to have been corrupted. And yet it will not belong to them either, whose names are uncertain: and so it will come about that, while everything belongs to everyone, nothing belongs to anyone.

By this confusion of defense, neither Marcion, nor Manichaeus, nor Arius, nor Eunomius could be accused: because whatever we should object as impiously said by them, their disciples will answer that it was not so published by their masters, but corrupted by enemies.

By this same reasoning, this very book of yours will not be yours, but perhaps mine. And my book, in which I answer you when accused, if you find fault with anything in it, will not be mine, but yours, by whom it is faulted. And while you refer everything to heretics, what will you attribute to ecclesiastical men, to whom you leave nothing as their own? And how, you will say, are there some faulty things in their books? If I answer that I do not know the causes of the faults, I will not immediately judge them heretics. For it may happen either that they simply erred, or wrote in another sense, or that their writings were gradually corrupted by unskilled copyists. Or certainly, before Arius was born in Alexandria like some noonday demon, they spoke certain things innocently and less cautiously, which could not escape the calumny of perverse men.

Crimes are charged against Origen, and you do not defend him, but accuse others; nor do you refuse the charge, but seek out a crowd of the guilty. If it were said to you, what associates does Origen have in heresy, you would rightly bring these forward. Now the question put to you is, whether these things which are found written in Origen's books are good or bad. You are silent, and speak other things in their place. Clement says this: Dionysius is caught in that error: Bishop Athanasius thus defends Dionysius's error: the writings of the Apostles were likewise depraved; just as now the charge of heresy is laid upon you by others, and you keep silent on your own behalf, and confess on mine. I accuse no one, content only to have answered for myself. I am not what you charge; if you are what you are accused of, you yourself will see to it. Neither my acquittal will prove me, nor your guilt prove you, either innocent or liable to the charge.

Having set forth beforehand the falsification by heretics of the apostles, and of both Clements, and of Dionysius, he comes to Origen, and speaks in these words: « We have proven this by the writings and utterances of the man himself complaining and lamenting. For what he himself, while still living in the flesh, feeling and seeing, suffered concerning the corruptions of his books or discourses, or their adulterated editions, is clearly taught from his own letter, which he writes to certain dear friends of his at Alexandria. » And immediately he appends the text of the letter; and he who imputes the falsification of Origen's writings to the heretics, himself begins with falsification: not translating as it stands in the Greek, nor conveying to the Latins what Origen himself professes in his own letter.

And whereas that whole letter tears at Demetrius, bishop of the city of Alexandria, and inveighs against the bishops and clergy of the whole world, and says that he has in vain been excommunicated by the churches, and does not wish to return curse for curse, lest he seem to be a man given to cursing—he who is so cautious about cursing that he dares not even curse the devil; whence too he gave Candidus, a follower of the Valentinian doctrine, occasion for calumny, because he said that the devil was of a nature capable of being saved—this man, suppressing the argument of the letter, feigns on Origen's behalf what Origen does not say. Wherefore I have translated a small part of the letter itself from what precedes, and joined to it what has been translated by him piecemeal and deceitfully, so that the reader himself may recognize with what design he passed over what precedes.

Disputing, then, in general against the priests of the Church, by whom he had been judged unworthy of communion, he added these words: « What need is there to speak of the sayings of the prophets, by which the shepherds, the elders, the priests, and the rulers of the people are very often threatened and rebuked? Which you can elicit from the sacred Scriptures without our help, and clearly perceive, that perhaps this may be the time of which it is said: Trust not in friends, nor hope in princes. And now let this prophecy be fulfilled: The leaders of my people have not known me, the children are foolish and are not wise. They are wise to do evil, but to do good they know not; of whom we ought rather to have pity than to hate them, and to pray for them rather than to curse them. For we were created to bless, and not to curse.

Whence also Michael, when he disputed with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring even against so great an evil a judgment of blasphemy, but said: The Lord rebuke thee. To which we read something similar also in Zechariah: The Lord rebuke thee, O devil; and the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee. Therefore we too desire that those be rebuked by the Lord who do not wish to be rebuked with humility by their neighbors. But when Michael says: The Lord rebuke thee, O devil; and Zechariah likewise: whether God rebukes or does not rebuke the devil, He Himself shall see.

And if He does rebuke, how He rebukes, He Himself knows. » And after many things which it would be tedious to write, he adds: « We hold this opinion, that they will be cast out of the kingdom of heaven, not only those who have sinned grievously—for example, fornicators and adulterers, and those who lie with males, and thieves—but also those who have committed lesser faults, from the fact that it is written: Neither the drunken, nor the railers, shall possess the kingdom of God; and that there is a measure both in the goodness and in the severity of God. Whence we strive to do all things with counsel: even in the drinking of wine, and in moderation of speech, so that we may dare to curse no one.

Therefore, since for fear of God we take care not to bring curses upon anyone, remembering that saying, He did not dare to bring a judgment of blasphemy, which is said of Michael against the devil; and in another place: They indeed reject dominions, but blaspheme glories: certain of those who gladly find occasions for contention ascribe to us and to our doctrine a blasphemy, concerning which let them see for themselves how they will hear that saying: Neither the drunken, nor the railers, shall possess the kingdom of God: although they say that the father of malice and perdition of those who are cast out of the kingdom of God can be saved—which not even one out of his mind could say. » He indeed translated the rest from the same letter in place of what we have interpreted at the end of Origen's words. « Therefore, since for fear of God we take care not to bring curses upon anyone, » and so on: but he, having fraudulently cut away what precedes, on which what follows depends, began to translate the letter as though this were the beginning of the sense, and says: « Certain of those who gladly accuse their neighbors ascribe to us and to our doctrine the crime of blasphemy, which they have never heard from us: concerning which let them see for themselves, unwilling as they are to keep that commandment which says: For railers shall not possess the kingdom of God; saying that I assert that the father of malice and perdition of those who are cast out of the kingdom of God, that is, the devil, is to be saved: which not even one moved in mind and manifestly insane could say. »

Compare the words of Origen, which I have translated word for word above, with these which have not been translated by this man but subverted, and you will perceive how great a discord there is between them, not only of words but also of meanings. I beg that this rather lengthy interpretation may not be troublesome to you. For I have translated everything for this reason, that I might prove with what design he passed over what precedes. There exists among the Greeks a dialogue of Origen and of Candidus, a defender of the Valentinian heresy, in which I confess I watched two gladiators (Andabatae) fighting blindfolded against each other. Candidus says that the Son is of the substance of the Father, erring in this, that he asserts a probole, that is, a "prolation" (emission).

On the other side, Origen, in agreement with Arius and Eunomius, opposes this, saying that He was neither emitted nor born, lest God the Father be divided into parts; but he says that He, a sublime and most excellent creature, came into being by the will of the Father, just as the other creatures did. Again they come to a second question. Candidus asserts that the devil is of the worst nature, and one that can never be saved. Against this Origen rightly responded that he is not of a substance destined to perish, but that he fell by his own will, and can be saved. This Candidus turned into a calumny, as though Origen had said that the nature of the devil is to be saved: what he had falsely charged, Origen here refutes. And we understand that it is only in this dialogue that heretical falsity is argued by Origen, and not in the other books, about which there was never any question.

Otherwise, if everything that is heretical is not to be Origen's but the heretics', while almost all his volumes are full of these errors—then nothing will be Origen's, but will belong to those whose names we do not know. It is not enough for him to slander the Greeks and the ancients, concerning whom, because of the antiquity of the times and the remoteness of the regions, he has license to lie as much as he pleases; he comes to the Latins, and first sets forth Hilary the confessor, saying that after the Council of Ariminum his book was falsified by heretics. And for this reason, when a question was raised against him in a council of bishops, he ordered the book to be brought from his own house—a book which, unbeknownst to himself, was kept in his own archives in heretical form. And when it had been brought forth, and judged heretical by all, the author of the book, excommunicated, departed from the assembly of the council.

And he thinks himself of such authority that, when he tells this dream to his intimates, no one dares to contradict him as he feigns these things against a confessor. Answer, I ask you: in what city was the synod by which he was excommunicated held? Name the bishops. Produce the texts of the subscriptions, whether of disagreement or of agreement. Tell who were the consuls in that year, what emperor ordered this synod to be assembled: whether only the bishops of Gaul were present, or also those of Italy and Spain: at least, for what reason the synod was assembled. You name none of these things, but you accuse of excommunication by a synod that most eloquent man, the trumpet of the Latin tongue against the Arians, in order to defend Origen. But the calumny against the confessor is somehow to be endured. He passes to the illustrious martyr Cyprian, and says that a book of Tertullian, entitled Of the Trinity, is read at Constantinople under his name by heretics of the Macedonian party.

In this charge he lies in two respects. For it is neither Tertullian's book, nor is it called Cyprian's, but Novatian's, under whose title it is also inscribed; and the author's eloquence and peculiarity of style demonstrate this.

And I think it superfluous to refute manifest absurdities, since a little tale of my own is thrust upon me—namely, that I was, forsooth, sought out by a synod, and under the name of a certain friend of Damasus, bishop of the city of Rome, to whom he had entrusted the dictation of ecclesiastical letters; and the cunning tricks of the Apollinarians are described, how they, having received Athanasius's book to read, where "the Lord's man" is written, corrupted it in such a way that, in the erasure, they wrote again what they had scraped off, so that it might be thought not falsified by them, but added by me. I ask you, dearest friend, that in ecclesiastical treatises, where the truth of doctrines is sought, and where the authority of our elders is demanded for the salvation of our souls, you dismiss ravings of this sort, and not hold tales of luncheons and dinners as proof of truth.

For it can happen that even if you have heard the truth from me, someone else who is ignorant of this matter may say that it was composed by you: and, like a mime of Philistio, or a trick of Lentulus and Marullus, cleverly fabricated in elegant speech.

To what point will unbridled temerity not come once it has broken loose? After the excommunication of Hilary, after the pseudonymous book of heresy attributed to Cyprian, after the erasure and rewriting of the title of Athanasius's book while I was asleep, he at length burst forth against the pope Epiphanius, and arranges in his Apology for Origen the grief of his heart, that in the letter which he had written to bishop John, he charged him as a heretic; and he consoles himself with these words: « Rather the hidden truth ought to be disclosed in this place. For it is not possible that any man should use so unjust a judgment as to think unequally about an equal cause. But the authors of his detractors are those who are accustomed either to dispute at greater length in the Church, or even to write books, who either speak or write wholly concerning Origen.

Lest, then, more people should recognize their thefts—which indeed, if they were not ungrateful to their teacher, would by no means seem criminal—they deter the more simple from reading him. Finally, a certain one of them, who thinks he has, as it were, a necessity of evangelizing among all nations and in all tongues to speak evil of Origen, confessed, in the hearing of a very great multitude of brethren, that he had read six thousand of his books. If indeed (as he himself is wont to say) he was reading them in order to know his evils, ten books could have sufficed for knowing them, or twenty at most, or thirty at the very most. But to read six thousand books is no longer to wish to know his errors and evils, but to have devoted almost one's whole life to his teachings and studies.

How, then, is he deservedly to be heard, when he blames those who, for the sake of their own instruction, have read a few of his works (with the rule of faith kept intact and piety whole)? »

Who are these men who are wont to dispute at large in the Church? Who write books? Who talk and write of nothing but Origen? Who, since they do not wish their own thefts to be recognized, and are ungrateful toward their master, therefore deter simple folk from reading him? You ought to name them expressly, and point out the men themselves. Are, then, the blessed bishops Anastasius, and Theophilus, and Venerius (of Milan), and Chromatius (of Aquileia), and the whole synod of Catholics, both of the East and of the West, who with one accord (because with one spirit) declare him a heretic to the people—are these to be judged thieves of his books? And when they preach in the churches, do they set forth not the mysteries of Scripture, but the thefts of Origen? Is it not enough for you to disparage everyone indiscriminately, unless you also direct the spear-point of your pen specially against a blessed and eminent priest of the Church?

Who is that man who thinks he has, as it were, a necessity of evangelizing among all nations and in all tongues by speaking ill of Origen? Who has confessed, in the hearing of a very great multitude of the brethren, that he has read six thousand of his books? In the midst of which multitude and company of brethren you too were standing, when he complains in his own letter that wicked doctrines had been put forth by you on behalf of Origen's heresy. Is it to be made a charge against him that he knew Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, and Egyptian, and in part Latin also? Then the Apostles too, and apostolic men who spoke in tongues, are under a charge; and will you, yourself bilingual, laugh at me for being trilingual? But as for the six thousand books which you pretend he read, who will believe either that you speak the truth, or that he could have lied?

For if Origen had written six thousand books, it might have happened that a most learned man, trained in the sacred Letters from infancy, should out of curiosity and love of learning have read the works of others. But how could this man have read what Origen himself did not write? Count the lists of his books contained in the third volume of Eusebius, in which he wrote the Life of Pamphilus: and you will not find, I do not say six thousand, but not even a third part of that number. We have a letter of the aforesaid Pontiff, in which, while you were still in the East, he answers this calumny of yours, and refutes the most manifest lie with the free brow of truth.

After all this, you dare in your Apology to say such great things—that you are not a defender of Origen, nor an upholder of him, on whose behalf Pamphilus and Eusebius seemed to you to have said too little. Against these volumes (if the Lord grant space of this life) I will try to reply elsewhere.

For now let it suffice to have met your assertions, and briefly to have instructed the prudent reader of this: that I first saw that book which was circulated under the name of Pamphilus written in your own manuscript; and because it was no concern of mine what might be said on behalf of a heretic, I always held it to be a work distinct from that of Pamphilus and Eusebius: but afterward, when the question was raised, wishing to answer their writings, and for this reason having read what each one thought concerning Origen, I plainly discovered that the first book of the six volumes of Eusebius is the very same one which you alone published under the name of Pamphilus, both in Greek and in Latin, with only the meanings concerning the Son and the Holy Spirit changed, which openly displayed blasphemy.

Wherefore also, about ten years ago, when my friend Dexter, who administered the prefecture of the praetorium, asked me to weave for him an index of the authors of our religion, among the other writers I set down this book too as published by Pamphilus, thinking it to be so, as it had been circulated by you and your disciples. But since Eusebius himself says that Pamphilus wrote nothing except brief letters to friends, and the first book of his six volumes contains the very same things, in the very same words, which have been fabricated by you under the name of Pamphilus, it is clear that you wished to disseminate this book for the purpose of introducing heresy under the person of a martyr. And since you have perverted many things in this very book which you pretend is Pamphilus's, and it reads one way in Greek and another in Latin, you ought not to lay your fraud to my error.

For I believed the book to be his whose title it bore, just as with the περὶ Ἀρχῶν, and many other works of Origen, and of very many Greek writers, which either I had not read before, or now am compelled to read, the question of heresy having been raised, so that I may know what I ought to avoid, what to approve. Whence also in my youth I translated, for those who simply asked me, only his homilies delivered to the people, in which such great scandals were not contained, prejudging nothing by this as to accepting, from what is approved, things that are manifestly heretical. Certainly (to make short a long discourse), just as I show that I received the book from those who transcribed it from your manuscript, so you show from whom you received your copy, so that whoever cannot name another author of the book may himself be held guilty of falsehood.

A good man brings forth from the good treasure of his heart the things that are good: and by the sweetness of the fruits, the tree of noble seed is known.

Brother Eusebius writes that he found, among the African bishops who had come to the Comitatus on ecclesiastical business, a letter written, as it were, in my name, in which I was doing penance, and testifying that I had been led by the Hebrews in my youth to translate Hebrew volumes into Latin, in which there is no truth. Hearing this, I was astonished. And since every word stands in the mouth of two or three witnesses, and indeed even Cato was not believed on a single witness, the writings of many brethren from the City taught me the same thing, asking whether it were so, and tearfully pointing out by whom that letter had been disseminated among the common people. He who has dared to do this—what else would he not dare? It is well that malice does not have as much power as it has attempts. Innocence would have perished, if power were always joined to wickedness, and calumny always prevailed in whatever it desires.

That most eloquent man could not reproduce my style, such as it is, and my form of eloquence: but amid the very trickery, and the other person's mask which he had fraudulently put on, he showed who he was. Therefore he who feigned a letter of penance under my name, alleging that I had translated the Hebrew volumes badly, is said to have objected that I had condemned the Scriptures in translating against the Seventy, so that whether what I translated be false or true, I remain guilty: either I confess that I erred in the new work, or the recent edition is a condemnation of the old. I wonder how in the same letter he did not call me a murderer, and an adulterer, and a sacrilegious man, and a parricide, and whatever base thing silent thought can turn over within itself. I owe him thanks that, though there is so great a forest of crimes, he has charged me with but one crime of error or falsehood.

Have I said anything against the Seventy interpreters, whom, most carefully corrected many years ago, I gave to the students of my own tongue, whom I expound daily in the assembly of the brethren, whose Psalms I chant in continual meditation? Was I so foolish that, being old, I would wish to forget what I learned as a boy? All my treatises are woven with their testimonies. My Commentaries on the twelve Prophets set forth both my own version and that of the Seventy. O ever uncertain labors of men! O the pursuits of mortals, sometimes having contrary ends! Whence I thought I was deserving well of my fellow Latins, and stirring up the minds of our people to learn—because even the Greeks, after so many interpreters, do not disdain a version from the Latin—thence I am called to blame, and food is forced upon a nauseated stomach. And what is safe in man, if innocence itself is criminal? While the householder slept, the enemy man oversowed tares.

The boar out of the wood has laid waste the vineyard, and a solitary wild beast has devoured it. I am silent, and letters not mine speak against me. I know not the crime, and yet I confess the crime before the whole world. Woe is me, my mother, why hast thou borne me, a man who is judged and discerned by the whole earth?

All the little Prefaces to the Old Testament, of which I have appended some copies in part, are witnesses to this matter. And it would be superfluous to write in some other way than it was written there. I will begin, then, with Genesis, whose Prologue is as follows: "I have received the longed-for letters of my desired friend, who by a certain presage of things to come has shared the name of Daniel, entreating me that I should render our Pentateuch, translated from the Hebrew speech into the Latin language, to the ears of our people. A perilous work indeed, and open to the barking of detractors, who assert that I am forging new things against the disparagement of the Seventy interpreters, in place of the old; testing my talent, as it were, like wine, though I have very often testified that I offer, according to my poor ability, what I can in the tabernacle of God; nor do I sully another's wealth with the poverty of others.

To dare this, the zeal of Origen provoked me, who mingled with the ancient edition the translation of Theodotion, distinguishing the whole work by asterisk ⁜ and obelus ÷, that is, star and dart: while he either causes to shine forth what before was lacking, or transfixes and cuts away whatever is superfluous, and we have supplied the books themselves. Especially those things which the authority of the Evangelists and Apostles has promulgated. Among which we read many things from the Old Testament that are not found in our codices, such as: Out of Egypt I have called my son; And: For he shall be called a Nazarene; and: They shall look on him whom they have pierced; and: Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water; and: Things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man, which God hath prepared for those who love him; and many other things, which require a treatise of their own.

Let us ask them, then, where these things are written; and when they cannot say, let us bring them forward from the Hebrew books. The first testimony is in Hosea. The second in Isaiah. The third in Zachariah. The fourth in Proverbs. The fifth likewise in Isaiah. Many, not knowing this, follow the ravings of the apocrypha, and prefer Iberian nonsense to the authentic books. It is not for me to expound the causes of the error. The Jews say it was done by a prudent design, lest Ptolemy, a worshipper of one God, should detect among the Hebrews also a double divinity: which they did especially because it seemed to fall into the doctrine of Plato. In short, wherever Scripture attests something sacred concerning the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, they either interpreted it otherwise, or were altogether silent, so as both to satisfy the king, and not to divulge the mystery of the faith.

And I know not who was the first author who built up, by his own falsehood, the seventy cells at Alexandria, in which, separated, they were supposed to write the same things, since Aristeas, the ὑπερασπιστής of that same Ptolemy, and much later Josephus, relate nothing of the kind, but write that they were gathered together in one hall and conferred, not that they prophesied. For it is one thing to be a seer, another to be an interpreter. There the spirit foretells things to come; here erudition and abundance of words translate what one understands. Unless perhaps we are to think that Tully, breathing with rhetorical spirit, translated the Oeconomicus of Xenophon, and the Protagoras of Plato, and Demosthenes' oration for Ctesiphon; so that the Holy Spirit wove testimonies from the same books differently through the Seventy interpreters, differently through the Apostles; so that what the former passed over in silence, the latter falsely claimed to be written. What then? Do we condemn the ancients? By no means.

But after the labors of our predecessors, we labor in the house of the Lord as much as we can. They translated before the coming of Christ; and what they did not know, they expressed in doubtful terms. We, after his passion and resurrection, write not so much prophecy as history. For things heard are told one way, things seen another. What we understand better, we express better. Hear then, O rival, and listen, O detractor: I do not condemn, I do not reprehend the Seventy; but I confidently prefer the Apostles to all of them. Through the mouth of these Christ sounds to me, whom I read placed even before the Prophets among the spiritual gifts: among which the interpreters hold almost the last rank. Why are you tortured with envy? Why do you stir up the minds of the unlearned against me? If anywhere I seem to you to err in translation, ask the Hebrews, consult the teachers of various cities: what they have concerning Christ, your codices do not have.

It is another matter, if afterward they proved testimonies used against themselves by the Apostles, and the Latin copies are more accurate than the Greek: the Greek, than the Hebrew."

In the books also of Samuel and Malachim, which we call the Four Books of Kingdoms, after the catalogue of divine Scripture I added this: « Since these things are so, I beg you, reader, not to think my labor a reprehension of the ancients. In the tabernacle of God each one offers what he can. Some offer gold and silver and precious stones, others fine linen and purple and scarlet and hyacinth. It goes well with us if we have offered skins and goats' hair. And yet the Apostle judges the more contemptible of our members to be the more necessary. Whence also that whole beauty of the tabernacle, and through its several kinds the distinction of the Church present and future, is covered with skins and haircloth; and these viler things keep off the heat of the sun and the injury of the rains. » See how much I swell with brow against the Seventy interpreters, since I profess that they offered gold and precious stones and purple, while I offered skins and goats' hair in the tabernacle of God?

I will set down another testimony too, lest you now say I have changed my opinion, compelled by the necessity of the case. In the book of Times, that is, of Paralipomenon, which in Hebrew is called Dabre jamim, I used this little Preface addressed to the holy Pope Chromatius: « If the pure edition of the Seventy interpreters, as it was translated by them into Greek, remained, you would needlessly urge me, my Chromatius, most holy and most learned of bishops, to translate for you the Hebrew volumes into the Latin tongue. For what had once occupied the ears of men, and had strengthened the faith of the nascent Church, it was right should be confirmed even by our silence.

But now, since according to the variety of regions different copies are in circulation, and that genuine and ancient translation has been corrupted and violated, you think it is a matter for our judgment either to decide out of many copies what is true, or to forge a new work upon an old work, and, while the Jews mock, to peck out, as the saying goes, the eyes of crows. Alexandria and Egypt praise Hesychius as the author of their Seventy. Constantinople as far as Antioch approves the copies of the martyr Lucian. The provinces in between read the Palestinian codices, which, elaborated by Origen, Eusebius and Pamphilus published; and the whole world fights among itself over this threefold variety.

And certainly Origen not only composed copies of the four editions, writing out each word in its own column, so that anyone dissenting might at once be shown up, the rest agreeing among themselves; but, what is of greater audacity, in the edition of the Seventy he mixed in the edition of Theodotion, marking with asterisks, namely, what had been lacking, and with obeli what seemed to have been added superfluously. If, then, it was permitted to others not to hold to what they had once received, and after the seventy cells, which are commonly bandied about without an author, to open separate cells each for himself; and this is read in the Churches which the Seventy did not know: why should my Latin readers not receive me, who, the old edition left inviolate, have so composed a new one that I may prove my labor by Hebrew, and (what is greater than these) by Apostolic, authorities?

I recently wrote a book On the Best Kind of Translating, showing that those passages from the Gospel: Out of Egypt have I called my son; and: Because he shall be called a Nazarene; and: They shall look on him whom they have pierced; and that saying of the Apostle: things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, which God has prepared for those who love him; and other things like these, are found in the books of the Hebrews. Certainly the Apostle and the Evangelists knew the Seventy interpreters. Whence then did they get this saying, which is not found in the Seventy? And Christ our Lord, the author of both Testaments, in the Gospel according to John: He that believes in me, as the Scripture says, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. Surely it is written, since the Saviour testifies that it is written. Where is it written? The Seventy do not have it, the Church does not know it from the apocrypha.

We must therefore return to the Hebrews: whence both the Lord speaks, and the disciples take their examples. I say this in peace with the ancients, and I answer only my detractors, who gnaw at me with a dog's tooth, tearing me down in public, reading me in corners—the same men both accusers and defenders, since they approve in others what they condemn in me, as though virtue and vice were not in the things themselves, but changed with the author. But I remember that I once gave to our people an edition of the Seventy translators, corrected from the Greek, nor ought I to be thought an enemy of those whom I always expound in the assembly of the brethren.

And as to why I have now translated Dabre jamim, that is, Words of Days, I did it in order that I might more clearly arrange the inextricable delays and forest of names, which are confused by the fault of copyists, and the barbarism of the meanings, dividing them by the cola of the verses, singing to myself and to my own after the manner of Ismenias, if the ears of the rest are deaf.

In the volume of Ezra also I made a similar preface, and after many things added this: « What I am about to bring forward is most just. I have published something which is not found in the Greek, or is found otherwise than as I have translated it. Why do they tear apart the translator? Let them question the Hebrews, and on their authority let them either grant or deny credit to my translation. Furthermore, it is another matter if, with closed eyes, as they say, they wish to curse me, and do not imitate the zeal and goodwill of the Greeks, who, after the Seventy translators, now that the Gospel of Christ is shining forth, diligently read the Jews and Ebionites, interpreters of the old Law—Aquila, namely, Symmachus, and Theodotion—and through the labor of Origen dedicated them to the Churches in the Hexapla: how much more ought my Latin readers to be grateful, seeing that exulting Greece borrows something from itself!

For in the first place it is a matter of great expense and infinite difficulty to have all the copies. Then again, even those who have them, if ignorant of the Hebrew tongue, will err the more, not knowing which of many has spoken more truly. This has happened even to a certain very wise man recently among the Greeks, that sometimes, leaving the sense of Scripture, he followed the error of some one interpreter or other. But we, who have at least a small knowledge of the Hebrew language, and to whom the Latin tongue is not lacking in some measure, can both judge better concerning others, and can express in our own tongue what we ourselves understand. »

I will pass on to the book of Job, which many years ago, after the edition of the Seventy interpreters, which Origen distinguished with obeli and asterisks, having been given to the Latin tongue, when I translated it again according to the Hebrew itself, I spoke thus: « I am forced, through each several book of divine Scripture, to answer the curses of adversaries, who charge my translation as a reproach of the Seventy interpreters: as though among the Greeks too Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion had not rendered either word for word, or sense for sense, or a mixed kind of translation compounded of both and tempered between them, and as though Origen had not distinguished all the volumes of the old Instrument with obeli and asterisks: which, whether added, or taken from Theodotion, he inserted into the ancient translation, proving that what was added had been lacking. Let my detractors, therefore, learn either to accept in whole what they have accepted in part, or to erase my translation along with its asterisks.

For it cannot be that those who have perceived that many things were omitted should not also confess that the same men erred in certain particulars: especially in Job, from which, if you subtract what has been added under the asterisks, the greatest part would be lopped off. And this is so only among the Greeks.

But among the Latins, before that translation which we have recently published under asterisks and obeli, nearly seven hundred or eight hundred verses are lacking, so that the book, curtailed and torn and gnawed, exhibits its own foulness publicly to those reading it. » And after many things which for the sake of brevity I pass over, I added this at the end: « Let my dogs hear, therefore, why I have labored on this volume: not that I might reprehend the ancient translation, but that those things in it which are either obscure, or omitted, or certainly corrupted by the fault of copyists, might be made more manifest by my translation—I who have both learned the Hebrew tongue in part, and have been worn smooth in Latin almost from the very cradle among grammarians and rhetoricians and philosophers.

But if among the Greeks, after the edition of the Seventy, now that the Gospel of Christ is shining forth, the Jew Aquila, and Symmachus and Theodotion, judaizing heretics, have been received, who by cunning interpretation concealed many mysteries of the Savior, and yet are held in the Hexapla among the Churches, and are explained by churchmen: how much more should I, a Christian, born of Christian parents, and bearing the standard of the cross on my forehead, whose zeal it has been to restore what was omitted, to correct what was corrupted, and to open the sacraments of the Church in pure and faithful speech, not be condemned either by fastidious or by malicious readers! »

The Psalter also, which certainly, most carefully corrected according to the Seventy interpreters by my own labor long ago, Rome received, when I translated it again according to the Hebrew, I fortified with a Preface, and thus spoke in part of the prologue: « Since, therefore, recently, disputing with a Hebrew, you brought forward certain testimonies from the Psalms on behalf of the Lord the Savior; and he, wishing to mock you, asserted, through almost every single expression, that it was not so held in the Hebrew as you were urging out of the Seventy interpreters, you most earnestly requested that, after Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, I should translate a new edition into the Latin tongue. For you said that you were more disturbed by the variety of interpreters, and, for the love with which you are captivated, would be content either with my translation or with my judgment.

Whence, impelled by you, to whom I ought not to deny even what I cannot do, I have again handed myself over to the barkings of detractors, and have preferred that you should seek my powers rather than my will in friendship. Certainly I will say with confidence, and I will cite many witnesses of this work, that I have changed nothing, at least knowingly, from the Hebrew truth. Wherever, therefore, my edition differs from the ancients, ask any Hebrew, and you will clearly see that I am torn apart in vain by rivals, who prefer to seem to despise excellent things rather than to learn them. Most perverse of men: for since they always crave new pleasures, and the neighboring seas do not suffice for their gullet, why in the sole study of the Scriptures are they content with the old flavor?

Nor do I say this as though I were biting at my predecessors, or thought anything should be detracted from those whose translation, most diligently corrected, I once gave to the men of my own tongue: but it is one thing to read the Psalms in the churches of believers in Christ, another to answer the Jews who cavil at every single word. »

The books of Solomon also, which I had once translated into Latin according to the Seventy with obeli and asterisks added, translating from the Hebrew, and dedicating to the holy bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, I added this at the end of my little Preface: « If anyone prefers the edition of the Seventy interpreters, he has it from us, corrected long ago. For we do not so forge new things as to destroy the old. »

I will come also to Isaiah, and will add a part of his Prologue concerning the translation of the Seventy. Whom, when I called him more an evangelist than a prophet, because he had followed out all the mysteries of the Church of Christ so clearly that he would be believed not to be prophesying of the future, but weaving a history of things past, I added this also: « Whence I conjecture that the Seventy interpreters were unwilling at that time to disclose clearly to the Gentiles the sacraments of their faith: lest they should give what is holy to dogs, and pearls to swine. » Which things, when you read this edition, you will observe were hidden by them. Nor am I ignorant how great a labor it is to understand the Prophets, nor can anyone easily judge concerning a translation unless he has first understood what he has read. We too lie open to the bites of very many, who, envy goading them, despise what they cannot attain to.

Knowingly, then, and deliberately I put my hand into the flame. And nevertheless I beg this of fastidious readers: that just as the Greeks, after the Seventy translators, read Aquila and Symmachus and Theodotion, either for the sake of their own learning, or that they might understand the Seventy better by comparison with them, so these too might deign to have at least one interpreter after the earlier ones. Let them read first, and afterward despise; lest they seem to condemn, not out of judgment, but out of the presumption of hatred, things unknown to them. »

But concerning Daniel I will briefly reply, that I did not deny him to be a prophet, whom I confessed to be a prophet at the very outset in the front of the Prologue, but I wished to show what the Hebrews said, and by what arguments they endeavored to prove their opinion, and to teach the reader that the churches of Christ read this prophet according to Theodotion, and not according to the Seventy translators. If in this book I said that their edition differs greatly from the truth, and is rejected by the correct judgment of the churches of Christ, this is not the fault of me who said it, but of those who read it. There are at hand four editions, of Aquila, Symmachus, the Seventy, and Theodotion: the churches read Daniel according to Theodotion. What sin have I committed, if I have followed the judgment of the churches?

But as to what I relate, what the Hebrews are accustomed to say against the story of Susanna, and the hymn of the three children, and the fables of Bel and the Dragon, which are not contained in the Hebrew volume, he who accuses me of this proves himself a foolish sycophant. For I did not set forth what I myself thought, but what they are accustomed to say against us. If I did not answer their opinion in the Prologue, being intent on brevity, lest I should seem to be writing not a preface but a book, I think I immediately subjoined it; for I said, "Of which it is not the time now to discuss." Otherwise, from the fact that I asserted that Porphyry said many things against this prophet, and called as witnesses to this matter Methodius, Eusebius, and Apollinarius, who answered his madness in many thousands of verses, he could accuse me as to why I did not write against the books of Porphyry in the little preface.

Let him who pursues such trifles, and does not wish to receive the truth of the Hebrew Scripture, hear me freely proclaiming: For no one is compelled to read what he does not wish. I wrote for those who asked, not for the fastidious; freely, not for the envious; for the studious, not for the yawning. And yet I marvel how he reads Theodotion, a heretic and a judaizer, and disdains the translation of a Christian sinner, whatever he may be.

I ask you, sweetest friend, who are so curious as to even know my dreams, and who call into accusation all the things I have written for so many years without fear of future calumny; answer me how you do not know the prefaces of the books you accuse: which by a kind of prophecy answered future calumny, fulfilling the proverb: "The antidote before the poison." How does our translation harm the churches? At great expense, as I know, you have redeemed the Jewish translators of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and of the fifth and sixth editions. Your Origen, and (lest perhaps you complain of being struck by figurative praise) our Origen (I call him ours on account of the erudition of his intellect, not on account of the truth of his doctrines), in all his books, after the Seventy interpreters, explains and expounds the translations of the Jews. Eusebius also and Didymus do the same.

I pass over Apollinarius, who indeed with good zeal, but not according to knowledge, attempted to sew patches from the translations of all into one garment, and to weave the sequence of Scripture, not according to the rule of truth, but according to his own judgment: apostolic men use the Hebrew Scriptures: it is clear that the apostles and evangelists themselves did this. The Lord and Savior, wherever He mentions the old Scripture, gives examples from the Hebrew volumes, as in that saying: He who believes in me, as the Scripture says: Rivers of living water shall flow from his belly. And on the very cross, ELI, ELI, Lema azabathani, which is interpreted: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Not as it is set down by the Seventy: God, my God, look upon me, why hast thou forsaken me? And many other things like these.

Nor do we say this in order to disparage the Seventy interpreters, but because the authority of the apostles and of Christ is greater, and wherever the Seventy do not disagree with the Hebrew, there the apostles took their examples from their interpretation; but where they differ, that could be in the Greek which they had learned among the Hebrews. Therefore, just as I show many things placed in the New Testament from the old books, which are not found in the Seventy, and teach that these are written in the Hebrew, so let the accuser show that something is written in the New Testament from the Seventy interpreters, which is not found in the Hebrew, and the contention is finished.

From all these things it is approved, both that the edition of the Seventy interpreters, which has been confirmed by the long usage of readers, is useful to the Churches, since before the Gentiles hear that Christ is to come, than He comes; and that the other interpreters are not to be rejected, because they translated not their own but the divine volumes, and that my friend ought to receive from a Christian and a friend that which he hastened to have copied for himself from the Jews at great expense. I have exceeded the measure of a letter, and I who had already set my pen against the wicked heresy, have been compelled to answer for myself, awaiting the friend's three volumes, and suspended in mind at the heap of his accusations: except that it is lighter to guard against a professed enemy, than to endure a hidden foe under the name of a friend.

Having read the letter of your prudence, in which you inveigh against me, and provoke to answer with books him whom you formerly praised, and called your true colleague and brother, and now terrify with accusations, I understood that saying of Solomon to be fulfilled in you: In the mouth of a fool is a rod of insult. And, a fool does not receive the words of prudence: unless you say what is in his heart. And Isaiah says: The fool will speak foolish things, and his heart will understand vain things: to fulfill iniquities, and to speak a lie against God. For what need was there to send volumes of accusation, and to bring forth curses into the open; if you, in the last part of the letter, deter me by the threat of death, lest I dare to answer your accusations, or rather your praises? For you both proclaim and accuse the same things, and from one fount proceed both sweet and bitter.

Wherefore I beg you, that you first show the modesty and shame which you demand of me; and that you, who accuse another of lying, cease yourself to lie. I give scandal to no one, nor am I meanwhile your accuser. For I do not consider what you deserve, but what befits me; and I greatly fear the word of the Savior, who says: Whoever shall scandalize one of these little ones who believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. And, Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come; but woe to that man by whom the scandal comes. I too could have heaped up false things against you, and said that I had either heard or seen things which no one notes, so that among the ignorant, impudence might be thought truth, and fury constancy. But far be it from me to imitate you; and to do what I reprehend in you.

Let him speak filth, who is able to commit filth: An evil man brings forth evil things out of the evil treasure of his heart. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Have this gain meanwhile, that your once friend, now accused, does not wish to object base things against you. And I say this, not because I fear the swords of your accusation; but because I would rather be accused than accuse, and suffer injury than do it, knowing the precept of the Apostle: Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto wrath; for it is written: Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, saith the Lord. But if your enemy hunger, feed him: if he thirst, give him drink. For in so doing you shall heap coals of fire upon his head. For he who avenges himself does not deserve the vengeance of the Lord.

And yet before I answer your letter, I wish to expostulate with you, oldest of monks, good presbyter, imitator of Christ: can you kill your brother, whom, if you only hate him so much, you are a murderer? Did you learn this from the Savior, that to him who strikes your cheek you should offer the other also? Thus he himself answered his smiter: If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why do you strike me? You threaten death, which even serpents can inflict. Death is common to all; murder is the mark of the worst. For what then? Unless you kill me, shall I be immortal? Rather, I am grateful, because you make a virtue of necessity. Did not the Apostles also disagree among themselves while their friendships remained safe; since Paul and Barnabas were angered over John, surnamed Mark, and a voyage separated those whom the Gospel of Christ joined? Did not the same Paul resist Cephas to his face, because he did not walk uprightly according to the Gospel?

And yet he calls him his predecessor and a pillar of the Church, and expounds his preaching with him, lest he should run, or have run, in vain. Do not even children, in matters of religion, disagree from parents, and spouses from husbands, while piety remains intact? If you believe as we believe, why do you hate us? If you believe otherwise, why do you wish to kill? Is whoever disagrees with you to be killed? I call to witness Jesus, judge of my conscience, who will judge both this letter and yours, that I wished, at the admonition of the holy pope Chromatius, to keep silence, and to put an end to strife, and to overcome evil with good; but because you threaten destruction unless I am silent, I am compelled to answer, lest by silence I seem to acknowledge the crime, and you interpret my gentleness as a sign of a bad conscience.

This is your true dilemma; brought forth not from the dialectical art, which you do not know, but from the workshop and meditation of executioners. If I am silent, I shall be guilty; if I answer, slanderous. You therefore both forbid me and compel me to answer. In this I will moderate both, so that I both refute the charges and refrain from injury. For who would not fear him who is ready to kill? And I will follow the footsteps of your proposition, keeping the rest for those most learned books, which I confuted before I had read them. You say "that you sent your accusation only to those who were injured by my words, and not to more: because one ought to speak to Christians not for show, but for edification." And whence, I ask you, did the fame of your books reach me? Who spread them at Rome? Who in Italy? Who through the islands of Dalmatia? If they lay hidden in your desk and those of your friends, how did my crimes reach me?

And do you dare to say that you speak, as it were a Christian, not for show but for edification, you who as an old man against an old man fabricate such things as a murderer would not say of a robber, a harlot of a prostitute, a buffoon of a mime? You who are in labor over mountains of accusations against me, and who so long beforehand sharpen the swords which you will plunge into my throat? Was it for this that your Cereales and your anabasii ran through diverse provinces, that they might read my praises? That they might recite your panegyric through corners and streets, and in the weaving-rooms of little women?

Is this your holy modesty, this Christian edification; are you so modest, so bashful, that crowds coming from the East have told me your curses; so accurately and consistently by memory, that I was compelled to answer not your writings, which I had not yet read, but the opinions of your writings, and to catch with the shield of truth the darts of falsehood flying through the whole world?

There follows in your letter: "Do not redeem my notary with much gold: as your friends did with my little sheets of Περὶ Ἀρχῶν, not yet corrected, not yet fully edited: so that they might more easily falsify what either no one had, or very few. Receive as a gift the codex sent by me, which you would wish to have obtained at great cost." Are you not ashamed of your proem? Would I redeem your notary with gold? And who is such and so great, that he would dare to contend in riches with Croesus and Darius? So as not to fear a sudden Demaratus, or a Crassus? Have you so far hardened your brow as to place your hope in a lie: and think that you can be protected by a lie, and that whatever you have fabricated must be believed of you? Who stole your letter of praise from Bethlehem, from the chamber of brother Eusebius?

By whose craft, and by whose ministers, in the hospice of holy Fabiola, and of that Christian and prudent man Oceanus, was found the codex which they had never seen? Or do you think yourself innocent, if whatever is yours you lay upon others? Whoever offends you, however simple, however innocent he may be, shall he at once become guilty? For you have that by which the chastity of Danae was conquered, that which Gehazi preferred to the sanctity of his master, on account of which Judas betrayed his Lord.

« Let us see nevertheless what my dear friend has falsified out of your notes, not yet corrected, and not yet reduced to a fair copy: and for this reason they were the more easily falsified by him, because either no one had them, or very few. » I both wrote before, and now again, with God as witness, I protest the same thing: that I have not approved his accusation, nor that of any Christian against a Christian. For what need is there that the scandal and ruin of many should be brought forth publicly, which you could correct or reprove in private? But since each man lives according to his own temperament, and a friend is not straightway master of another's will: just as I reprehend an accusation even when true, so I do not suspect falsification of notes in a holy man. For what could a man of Latin speech alter in a Greek translation?

Or what could he subtract or add in the books Περὶ Ἀρχῶν, where everything is so woven together, and one thing depends upon another, that whatever you wished to remove or add would at once appear like a patch on a garment? Therefore what you advise me to do, do yourself: assume at least a little human shame, if not Christian, lest, your conscience despised and trampled underfoot, you think yourself cleared by words, when you are hard pressed by facts. If Eusebius bought with gold your uncorrected notes, which he might falsify, produce your own, which have not been falsified: and if you prove that there is nothing heretical in them, then he will be held guilty of the crime of falsification. However much you change, however much you correct, you will not prove them catholic. For if the error were in words, or in a few meanings, the bad parts could be cut out, and good ones put in their place.

But where the whole argument is uniform throughout—that all rational creatures, who fell by their own will, afterward return again into one condition; that again from the same beginning there will be other falls—what do you have to correct, unless you change everything? But if you wish to do this, you will no longer be translating another's books, but composing your own. What sort of argument this is, I do not understand. Because, he says, the notes were uncorrected, and not yet reduced to a fair copy, therefore they were more easily falsified by Eusebius. Either I am too slow-witted, or this seems to me quite foolish and obtuse. If the notes were not yet corrected, nor reduced to a fair copy, their error will not be imputed to Eusebius, but to your delay and slowness, since you ceased to correct them. And in this alone will he be culpable, that he quickly disseminated among the common people your writings, which you had determined to correct little by little.

But if, as you would have it, Eusebius falsified them, why do you complain and allege that uncorrected and not yet fair-copied writings burst forth into publication? For both the corrected and the uncorrected receive a like falsification. No one, you say, had those books, or very few indeed. What diversity in a single statement! If no one had them, how were they among a few? If a few had them, why do you falsely claim that no one had any? But since you say they were among a few; and, by your own confession, that which you said—that no one had them—is overturned, where is that of which you complain, that your notary was bribed with gold? Name the notary, how much gold was given, where, by whom, or to whom it was given. Surely you have cast off your betrayer from yourself, and separated the guilty party of so great a crime from your company.

See rather whether this is not more likely true: that copies were given by those few friends of yours, to Eusebius and to others, which so agree and correspond among themselves that one does not differ from another even by a single point. Then, what prudence is it to give a copy to others, which you had not yet corrected? The writings were not written out fairly; and others already possessed your errors yet to be corrected. Do you not perceive that the lie does not hang together with itself? And what did it profit you, at the critical moment, to avoid the judgment of the bishops, to refuse to submit to examination, and to be refuted by your own words? From which it appears, according to the famous orator's (Cicero's) verdict, that you have the will to lie, but not the art of fabricating.

I shall follow the order of the letter, and I shall append its very words, as you spoke them. « Your eloquence, as you say, I confess I praised also in my Preface; and even now I would praise it, if you did not, contrary to the judgment of your own Tully, render it odious by so much boastfulness. » Where have I boasted of my eloquence, who did not even willingly accept it when praised by you? Or do you say this because you do not wish to be flattered by treacherous praise? You will be openly accused, as one who, by rejecting the praiser, feels himself the accuser. But your ignorance I was not so foolish as to reprehend; for no one can accuse it more forcefully than you yourself do while writing. But I wished to show your fellow-students, who did not learn letters along with you, what progress you have made in thirty years in the East: you who, a συγγραφεὺς ἀγράμματος (an unlettered writer), consider impudence, glibness, and reviling everyone to be the mark of a good conscience.

Nor do I, as you say, apply the ferule to you, nor strive to teach letters to my "Athenian elder" (my old pupil) with the strap and blows; but because none of us commentators can bear the thunderbolt of your eloquence and learning, and you dazzle our eyes with the sharpness of your wit, so much so that you think all envious of you, we eagerly strive to overwhelm you: lest, if you should once obtain the primacy in writing, and stand upon the citadel of eloquence, all of us who wish to know something should not be allowed to mutter. I a philosopher, a rhetorician, a grammarian, a dialectician, a Hebrew, a Greek, a Latin, trilingual. In this way you too will be bilingual, who have such knowledge of Greek and Latin speech, that the Greeks think you Latin, and the Latins think you Greek: and Pope Epiphanius πεντάγλωττος (five-tongued), because he speaks in five languages against you and your Amasius (Origen).

At the same time I marvel with what rashness you dare to speak thus against a man of such great learning: « You who keep watch with the eyes of so many disciplines, how are you to be pardoned, if you have erred, and not rather to be covered with perpetual silence of shame? » When I had read this, and thought I had perhaps slipped somewhere in speech (for he who does not sin in word, is perfect), and suspected that he was about to bring forth some fault of mine, suddenly he added: « Two days before the bearer of these letters was to set out, there came into my hands what you have declaimed against me. » Where then is that with which you threaten, and say, « How are you to be pardoned, if you have erred, and not rather to be covered with perpetual silence of shame? » Unless perhaps, owing to the shortness of time, you were able to arrange these things in order; or you were about to hire some learned man, who might search out in my little works the jeweled ornaments of your eloquence.

Above you wrote: « Receive freely the book sent by me, which you would have wished to be procured at great expense, » and now you speak with pretenses of humility. I wished to imitate you; but since he who was returning to you was hastening back, I preferred to write a few words to you rather than write more broadly to others concerning your slanders. And meanwhile you boldly enjoy your ignorance. For once you confessed, saying: « The rebuke in a few points was superfluous to you, which is acknowledged by us to hold in all. » Nor will I reprehend that you put "procured" for "bought": since procurement pertains to things of equal value; purchase, to the reckoning of a price: and "since he who was returning to you was hastening back"—a most sordid περισσολογία (redundancy) of expression. I shall answer only the substance; and I shall prove you to be, not indeed a solecist and a barbarian, but a liar, crafty, and shameless.

If you write a letter to me alone, in order to admonish me, and wish me to be corrected, lest you give scandal to others, and, while others rage, others should be slain: why do you write books against me to others, and disperse them through the whole world to be read by your henchmen? Where is your syllogism, by which you try to entangle me, and you say: « Whom, best of masters, did you wish to correct by this? » if those to whom you write had done no wrong; if I, whom you accuse, you had not written to. » And I will answer you in your own words: Whom did you wish to correct, unlearned master? Those who had not sinned? Or me, to whom you had not written?

Do you think your readers are stupid, and that all fail to perceive your prudence—nay, your malice, by which the serpent was more prudent than all the beasts in paradise—that you demand of me a secret admonition, whom you pursue with public accusation; and are you not ashamed to call your accusation an Apology? And do you complain that I raise a shield against your dagger, and, as though you were pious and holy, put on yourself the mask of humility, and say: « If I had erred, why do you write to others, and not refute me myself? » This very thing I shall turn back upon you: Whatever you accuse me of not having done, why did you not do it yourself? Just as if someone, striking another with fists and kicks, should say to him, if he wishes to resist: Has it not been commanded you: Whoever strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other also?

For what, good sir, has been commanded you, that you should beat me, gouge out my eye; and if I stir but a little, you sing me the Gospel's precepts? Do you wish to know all the twists of your cunning, and the snares of the little foxes that dwell in ruined walls, of which Ezekiel speaks: Your prophets, O Israel, are like foxes in the desert (Ezekiel 13:4)? Listen to what you have done. You praised me in your Preface in such a way that your praises were thrown up against me as an accusation, and unless I had disowned kinship with so great a praiser, I would have been judged a heretic.

After I repelled the charges—that is, your praises—and, without envy toward your name, answered the charges, not the accuser; and, in order to prove myself catholic though defamed by you, inveighed against the heretics; you grow angry, you rage, and forge most venomous books against me: which, when you had handed over to be read and sung by all, letters came flocking to me from Italy, from the city of Rome, and from Dalmatia, in which you, my former eulogist, had adorned me with such praises.

I confess, I answered the charges at once; and I strove with all my strength to prove that I am not a heretic. And I sent these very books of my Apology to those whom you had wounded; so that my antidote might follow your poison. For this fault you send me both your earlier books and a recent letter, full of injuries and accusations. What do you wish me to do, good friend? Should I be silent? I shall seem to acknowledge the charge. Should I speak? You terrify me with your swords, and threaten an accusation no longer ecclesiastical, but before the tribunals. What have I done? What have I deserved? In what have I wronged you? Because I denied being a heretic? Because I judged myself unworthy of your praises? Because I described in plain speech the frauds and perjuries of heretics? What is that to you, who boast yourself both catholic and truthful, who more readily accuse me than defend yourself? Is my defense your accusation?

Or can you not be orthodox otherwise, unless you prove me a heretic? What does my fellowship profit you? Or what sort of prudence is this? Accused by others, you accuse another. You are attacked by one, and, turning your back on him, you provoke one who was at rest against you.

I call to witness Jesus the mediator, that it is unwillingly and reluctantly that I descend to these words; and that, unless you had provoked me, I would always have kept silent. In short, cease to accuse, and I will cease to defend. For what edification is it to the hearers, that two old men should fight each other over heretics: especially since both wish to be seen as Catholics? Let us set aside the patronage of heretics, and there will be no contention between us. With the same fervor with which we formerly praised Origen, let us now condemn him, condemned as he is throughout the whole world. Let us join right hands, let us unite our minds: and let us follow with eager step the two τροπαιοφόροι (trophy-bearers) of East and West (Theophilus and Anastasius). We erred as young men; let us amend as old men. If you are a brother, rejoice that I am corrected. If I am a friend, I ought to rejoice at your conversion.

As long as there is strife between us, we shall seem to hold the right faith out of necessity, not by choice. Our enmities mutually take away from each other the testimony of true repentance. If we believe one thing, if we both will and refuse the same things (from which even Catiline testifies that firm friendships are born), if we equally hate heretics, and equally condemn the old error, why do we contend against one another, since we assail the same things, we defend the same things? Forgive me, that I praised, in my youth, before I knew his heresy more fully, the learning and diligence of Origen in the Scriptures; and I will grant you pardon, that you have written an Apology for his books with hoary head.

You testify that my little books came into your hands two days before you wrote your Letter to us, and that for this reason you did not have leisure time to respond: otherwise, if you had said that you cast thunderbolts at us after meditation and preparation, you would not seem to be laying charges. And who will believe you, a most truthful man, that you, a merchant of eastern wares, who had to sell the goods brought from there and buy there what you might again transport hither, were at Aquileia for only two days, so that you were forced to dictate a letter against us hastily and off the cuff? For are your books, which you polished over three years, more eloquent? Unless perhaps there was no one at hand to correct your trifles, and so the whole course of your discourse, lacking the art of Pallas, is broken up with the ruts and pitfalls of faults.

So plain is the falsehood about the time, that I will not say you could have answered my writings in two days, but you could not even have read them. From this it is evident that you either wrote that letter over many days, as the elegance of the very style proves; or, if it is a tumultuous composition, then surely you are careless, since though you are such an extempore speaker, you were worse when you had prepared beforehand.

Now as to what you evade, and say, that you translated from Greek those things which I had first translated into Latin speech, I do not fully understand what you mean to say: unless perhaps you are still accusing the Commentaries on Ephesians, and, as though nothing had been answered to you on this point, you harden the impudence of your brow, and with ears stopped up you do not receive the voices of the one casting the spell. In the Commentaries, both those and others, I have set forth both my own opinion and that of others, openly confessing what is heretical, what is catholic. For that is the custom of Commentaries, and the rule of those who expound, to pursue various opinions in the exposition, and to explain what seems true either to themselves or to others. And this is done not only by interpreters of the sacred Scriptures, but also by expositors of secular literature, both in the Latin tongue and in the Greek. You cannot make the same claim regarding your books On First Principles.

For your own little Preface will convict you, in which you promise that, the evil parts having been cut off, and those things which had been added by heretics removed, the best remained: so that whatever there is good or bad, it is no longer to be imputed to him whom you translate, but to you who have interpreted; unless perhaps you ought to have corrected the errors of the heretics, and brought Origen's evils out into the open. But concerning this, since you refer me to the manuscript, I answered you before I read your writings.

Concerning the book of Pamphilus, a thing happened to me that was not ridiculous, as you write, but ridiculous indeed, in that after I had asserted it to be Eusebius's, not Pamphilus's, I at last said that I too for very many years had thought it to be Pamphilus's, and that I had borrowed a copy of this volume from you. See how much I fear your mockery, that even now I bring up the same things again. From your manuscript we received it as though it were a copy of Pamphilus. I believed a Christian, and I believed a monk: I did not think so great a crime could be fabricated by you. But afterward, through your translation, the question having been stirred up against Origen throughout the whole world, I became more diligent in seeking out copies, and in the Library of Caesarea I found six volumes of Eusebius's Apology for Origen.

When I had read these, I discovered first that book which you alone published under the name of the martyr, concerning the Son and the Holy Spirit, most of the blasphemies having been changed for the better. And whether Didymus did this, or you, or some other person I do not know, is what you are most openly proven to have done in the books On First Principles: especially since this same Eusebius, as I have already shown in the two preceding books, writes that Pamphilus published no work of his own. Tell then, you too, from whom you received the copy, and do not, to escape the charge, name to me some dead persons: so that, since you cannot produce the author, you may bring forward one who cannot answer. But if that little stream in your desk-cases has its source, you do not doubt what follows, even though I say nothing.

But suppose that by some other lover of Origen, the title of this book and the author's name were changed—why do you translate this into the Latin tongue? Evidently so that, by the testimony of a Martyr, all might believe Origen's writings, the defense of so great an author and witness having been sent ahead as a fortification. Nor is the Apology of that most learned man sufficient for you, unless you also write your own volume in his defense: which, having been widely disseminated, you now safely translate the books On First Principles from the Greek, and commend these very books with a Preface, saying that some things in them had been corrupted by heretics, which you have corrected from the reading of Origen's other books. You praise me too, lest any of my friends should contradict you. You proclaim Origen's herald (praeco), you extol my eloquence to the heavens, that you may sink faith into the mire; you call me brother and colleague, and you confess yourself an imitator of my work.

And though you boast of the seventy homilies of Origen translated by me, and some volumes on the Apostle, in which I so polished everything that the Latin reader finds nothing in them that disagrees with the catholic faith; now you accuse these very books of being heretical: and with your pen reversed, him whom you had praised, because you thought him an ally, you now accuse, since you perceive him to be an enemy of your faithlessness. Which of the two is the calumniator of the martyr? I, who say that he was not a heretic, and did not write the book which is reprehended by everyone; or you, who published the volume of an Arian man, its title changed, under the name of the Martyr? The scandal of Greece is not enough for you, unless you thrust it also into the ears of the Latins, and by your translation, as far as in you lies, disfigure the renowned Martyr. You indeed did this with another intention, not to accuse me, but to defend Origen's writings through me.

But know that the Roman faith, praised by an Apostolic voice, does not receive tricks of this sort; even if an Angel should announce otherwise than has once been preached, it cannot be changed, being fortified by Paul's authority. Therefore, brother, whether the book was falsified by you, as many think, or by another, as you will perhaps try to persuade, and you rashly published the composition (syntagma) of a heretical man as that of a martyr, change the title, and free Roman simplicity from so great a danger. It is not to your advantage that through you the most illustrious martyr should be judged a heretic; that he who poured out his blood for Christ should be proven contrary to the faith of Christ. Say rather, I found a book, I thought it the martyr's: do not fear repentance. I will not press you further, I will not ask from whom you received it: either name some dead person, or say that you bought it in the street from some unknown man.

For we do not seek your condemnation, but your conversion. It is better that you should have erred, than that the Martyr should have been a heretic. Meanwhile, from your present fetter, at any rate free your foot. In the future judgment you shall see what you will answer to the martyr's complaints against you.

You also propose to yourself what no one objects, and you refute what no one accuses. For you say that you read in my letters: "Say, who allowed you, in translating, to take away certain things, to change certain things, to add certain things?" And immediately you answer yourself, and speak against me: "See, I say to you: I ask, who allowed you in your Commentaries to write certain things from Origen, certain things from Apollinaris, certain things from yourself, and not all from Origen, either from yourself or from another?" Meanwhile, while doing something else concerning yourself, you have betrayed the strongest charge against yourself, and you have forgotten the old proverb: that liars ought to have good memories. For you say that in my Commentaries I have set down certain things from Origen, certain things from Apollinaris, certain things from myself.

If then those things which I have set down under the names of others are Apollinaris's and Origen's, how in your books do you fasten upon me a charge, when I write: "Another says this; someone suspects thus"—that "another" and "someone" should be me. Between Apollinaris and Didymus there is a great difference of explanation, style, and doctrines. When in one chapter I set down different opinions, am I to be believed to follow contrary meanings? But of this elsewhere.

Now I ask you: who has objected to you why you either took away certain things from Origen, or added, or changed them, and questioned you as though hung upon the rack: are the things you have translated good, or bad? In vain do you feign innocence, so that by a foolish question you might diminish the true inquiry. I did not accuse you because you translated Origen according to your own will: for I myself have done this, and before me Victorinus, Hilary, and Ambrose did it; but because you have confirmed a heretical translation by the testimony of your Preface. You force me to repeat the same things again, and to walk over my own lines. For you say in that same Prologue that you cut away those things which had been added by heretics, and that you put back in good things in their place.

If you took away the evils of the heretics, then the things which you left or added must be either Origen's or your own, which you have of course set down as good. But you will not be able to deny that many of these are evil. What, you will say, is that to me? Impute it to Origen: for I have only changed those things which were added by heretics. Explain the reasons why you removed the evils of the heretics, and left Origen's own untouched. Is it not plain that you condemned Origen's evils in part under the name of the heretics, and in part accepted them, because you judged them not evil but good, and belonging to your own faith?

These are the things concerning which I asked, whether they were good or evil, which you praised in the Preface, which, the worst having been cut away, you confessed to have remained as the best, and yourself hung upon the rack of true argumentation, so that if you say they are good, you are proven a heretic; if evil, you will immediately hear: Why then did you praise in the Preface things that are evil? And I did not add that which you craftily pretend: Why did you bring the things that were evil to the knowledge of the Latins? For to show evils is sometimes not the part of one teaching, but of one forbidding: so that the reader may beware, not follow the errors; that he may despise what is known, which things sometimes, being unknown, are a marvel.

And after this you dare to say that I am the author of such writings; but that you, as translator, in those places where you were able to correct something, did more than a translator; in those where you could not, were merely a translator. You would rightly say these things, if your books On First Principles did not have that little Preface. As Hilary did in translating his Homilies, so that both the good and the bad might be imputed not to the translator, but to their own author. If you had not said that you had cut away the worst and left the best, you might somehow escape from the mire. This is what destroys the tricks of your little wit, and does not allow you, bound on both sides, to escape. Nor should you so abuse the simplicity of the reader, and think all who are going to read your writing so brutish, that while you let the wounds fester, they will not laugh at you for applying plasters to a healthy body.

On the resurrection. Concerning the resurrection of the flesh, what you think we have already learned in your Apology, "with no member cut off, nor any part of the body severed." This is the pure and open confession of your simplicity, which you assert has been received by all the bishops of Italy. I would believe you speaking, did not that book—not Pamphilus's—make me doubt concerning you. And yet I marvel how Italy has approved what Rome has scorned? That bishops should have received what the Apostolic See condemned.

Two letters of Theophilus rendered into Latin by Jerome. You also write that I indicated in a letter that Pope Theophilus had recently issued an exposition of the faith, which has not yet reached you, and you promise that whatever he has written, you will follow. I do not recall having written this, nor do I recall ever having sent such a letter. But you consent to uncertain things for this very purpose, and to those things whose nature you do not yet know, so that you may avoid certain things, and not be bound to their assent. I have translated, within about this last two years, two letters of his, the synodical and the paschal, against Origen and his disciples, and others against Apollinaris and the same Origen; and for the edification of the Church, I have given them to men of our own tongue to read. I know of no other of his works that I have translated.

And yet you, who say that you follow the opinion of Pope Theophilus in all things, take care lest your masters and fellow-disciples hear this, and you offend very many who call me a bandit, you a martyr, lest he grow angry with you who, sending letters against Bishop Epiphanius to you—the presbyter Isidore had written "horasseclas" against St. Epiphanius before he came sent by Theophilus, as noted above in the book against John, exhorted that you should remain in the truth of the faith, and not change your judgment through any terror. Which letter, in his own hand, is kept by those to whom it was delivered.

And after this, in your usual manner, you speak: "As to what you had said above, I will satisfy even your fury: now you say, What does it seem to you: do you have anything further with which to stretch the sinews of your loquacity?" And you are indignant if I charge you with speaking crudely, when you, an ecclesiastical writer, take up the filthiness of Comedies and the sportive doings of harlots and lovers?

Concerning the bishop Paul. Moreover, as to your question, when I began to follow the judgment of Pope Theophilus, and to be joined to him in communion of faith, you yourself answer for me: "Then, I believe, when with utmost effort and every zeal you were defending Paul, whom he had condemned; when you were urging that he receive back through an imperial rescript the priesthood which he had lost by episcopal judgment." I will not answer for myself before I have spoken of the injuries done to others. What sort of humanity, what sort of clemency is it, to insult the miseries of others, and to display to all the wounds belonging to another? Is this what that Samaritan taught you—to carry the half-dead man to the inn? To pour oil upon his wounds? To promise a reward to the innkeeper? Thus was the sheep brought back, the coin found, the prodigal son received, as it is written.

Grant that I had injured you, and that by certain goads, as you say, I had provoked you to the madness of railing accusations: what had a hidden man deserved, that you should lay bare his scar, and with unlooked-for pain tear open the skin that had healed over it? Even if he had deserved reproaches, ought not you still to have refrained? Either I am mistaken, or that is true which very many are saying, that you persecute the enemies of the Origenists in that man, and under the pretext of one, rage against both. If you delight in the judgments of Pope Theophilus, and think it wicked that the decrees of pontiffs should be overturned, what do you say of the others whom he himself condemned? What of Pope Anastasius, of whom, as you say, it seems true to no one, that the priest of so great a city could have done injury either to an innocent man, or to one absent?

Nor do I say this as one who judges the opinions of bishops, or who wishes their decrees to be rescinded; but I say that each man acts at his own peril as seems good to him, and he himself knows how his own judgment is to be judged. With us in the monastery hospitality is dear to the heart; and all who come to us we receive with the cheerful countenance of humanity. For we fear lest Mary with Joseph should find no place in the inn, lest Jesus, shut out, should say to us: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in. Only heretics do we not receive—those whom you alone receive. For it is our purpose to wash the feet of those who come, not to examine their merits. Remember, brother, his confession, and the breast which the scourges cut. Remember the prison, the darkness, the exile, the mines, and you will not be indignant that a man passing through was received in hospitality.

Or do we seem rebels to you for this reason, that we hold out a cup of cold water in the name of Christ to those who thirst?

Do you wish to know why you both love him more, and yet ought to hate him more than we? The faction of heretics lately put to flight from Egypt and Alexandria betook themselves to Jerusalem, and wished to be joined to this man, so that of those whose grief was one, the accusation also might become one. He repulsed them, spurned them, cast them off, saying that he was not an enemy of the faith, nor was he undertaking wars against the Church: that what he had first attempted had been a matter of grief, not of faithlessness; and that he had not sought the innocence of another, but had wished to prove his own. Do you think it impious that, after the sentences of priests, there should be an imperial rescript? Let him know what sort of thing that is, who has earned it. What seems to you of those who, though condemned, besiege the palaces, and having formed a wedge, persecute the faith of Christ in one man?

For my communion, and that of Pope Theophilus, I shall call no other witness than the very man whom you pretend was injured by me, whose letters, always sent to me, you are well aware of even at that time when you were forbidding them to be delivered to me, and when, sending messengers daily, you were boasting that his enemy was our friend and most intimate companion, and were lying about the very things you now shamelessly write, in order to stir up his hatred against us, and that the grief of injury might become the suppression of the faith. But that man, prudent and of apostolic wisdom, has proved by time and by facts both our disposition toward him, and your plots against us. If my disciples, as you write, stirred up plots against you at Rome, and stole your uncorrected drafts while you slept, who stirred up Pope Theophilus against the rebels in Egypt? Who stirred the decrees of kings? Who the agreement of the whole world in this matter?

And you boast that from your youth you were a hearer and disciple of Theophilus, though he, before he became bishop, on account of the humility innate in him, never taught, and you, after he became bishop here, were never at Alexandria. And you dare to say, in disparagement of me, "My masters I neither accuse nor change." But if this is true, you make your own conduct suspect to me. For I do not condemn my instructors, as you falsely charge, but I fear that word of Isaiah: Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. But you, while you drink together the honeyed wine and the poison of your masters, have departed from the Master, the Apostle, who teaches that not even an angel, nor himself, if they err in the faith, are to be followed.

What you are dreaming of under the name of Vigilantius, I do not know. For where did I write that he was stained with heretical communion at Alexandria? Produce the book, bring forth the letter—you will nowhere find it at all; and with the same license, nay impudence of lying, by which you think all will believe your words, you add: "When you laid down against him from the Scriptures a testimony so injurious that I myself do not dare to repeat it with my own mouth." You do not dare to repeat it, you who by your silence accuse the more. And because you have nothing to charge me with, you feign modesty, so that the reader may think you are sparing me—you who, in lying, have not even spared your own soul. What is that testimony from the Scriptures, which cannot come forth from that most modest mouth of yours? Or what shameful thing can be recalled from the sacred Books?

If you blush to speak it, at least write it, so that your own words may convict you the more of shamelessness. To pass over other things, from this one chapter alone I will prove that you possess a face of iron in deceit. See how much I fear your accusation. If you produce what you threaten, everything that is yours will become mine. I answered you concerning Vigilantius. For he was accusing the very things which you afterwards, as a friend, praise, and as an enemy, accuse. I know by whom his fury against me was stirred up; I know your tunnelings. I am not ignorant of the simplicity which all proclaim of him. Through his folly your malice raged against me; and if I repelled it by my letter, lest you alone should seem to hold the staff of literature, you ought not to feign shame at words which you have never at all read; but you ought to understand and confess that, through his witlessness, an answer was made to your calumnies.

In the matter of the letter of the holy Pope Anastasius you have shown yourself slippery; and, in confusion, you cannot find where to plant your step. For now you say it was composed by me, now that it ought to have been sent by him to you, to whom it was addressed. Again you charge injustice on the part of the writer; even if it was written by him, or not written, you testify that it does not pertain to you at all, though you have the testimony of his predecessor, and though, when Rome asked you to grace her with your presence, you scorned it out of love for your little town. If you suspect the letter was forged by me, why do you not demand that it be sought in the archive of the Roman Church?

So that, when you have caught it as not given by the bishop, you might hold me most manifestly guilty of the crime: and you would not be opposing me with the flimsy webs of spiders, but binding me with the strongest and most solid net. But if it is the Roman bishop's, you act foolishly in seeking from him a copy of the letter, to one to whom it was not sent, and in not awaiting testimony from the East, from him who sent it—whose author and witness you have close at hand. Go rather to Rome, and there in person demand of him why he did injury to you, both absent and innocent. First, why he did not accept the exposition of your faith, which, as you write, all Italy approved, and applied the staff of your own writings, where he was unwilling, against your dogs.

Next, why he sent letters against you to the East, and, while you did not know it, branded you with the cautery of heresy, and said that the books of Origen Περὶ Ἀρχῶν had been translated by you, and handed over to the guileless Roman Church, so that through you they might lose the truth of the faith which they had learned from the Apostle, and, in order to make you more odious, dared to accuse these very books, though strengthened by the testimony of your own Preface. It is no light matter which the pontiff of so great a city casts upon you, or has rashly taken up as charged by another. Cry out and shout through the crossroads, through the public squares: "It is not my book; and if it is mine, Eusebius stole away the uncorrected drafts by theft. I published it otherwise, nay, I did not publish it at all.

I gave it to no one, or certainly to few; and so wicked was my enemy, so careless my friends, that all the copies were equally falsified by him." This, dearest brother, is what you ought to have done, and not, turning your back on him, direct across the sea the arrows of your railings against me. For what does it profit your wounds, if I am wounded? Or is it a comfort to the stricken man to see his friend dying along with him?

You produce the letter of Siricius, now sleeping in the Lord, and you scorn the words of the living Anastasius. For what harm, as you say, can it do you, what he, without your knowledge, either wrote, or perhaps did not write? And if he did write it, the testimony of the whole world suffices for you—that it seems true to no one, that the priest of so great a city could have done injury either to one innocent, or to one absent. You call yourself innocent, at whose interpretation Rome trembled. Absent—you, who, being accused, do not dare to answer. And you flee the judgment of the city of Rome so much, that you would rather endure a barbarian siege than the sentence of a peaceful city. Grant that I forged last year's letter. But who sent the recent writings to the East? In which Pope Anastasius adorns you with such flowers, that when you read them, you will rather begin to wish to defend yourself, than to accuse us.

And consider at the same time that inimitable prudence of yours, and your Attic wit, and the charm of holy eloquence. You are sought after by others, you are pierced through by the accusations of others, and against me you rage and rave, and you say: "Can I not also relate how you departed from the City? What was judged concerning you at the time? What was written afterward, what oath you swore? Where you boarded ship? How piously you avoided perjury? I could have unfolded it, but I have chosen to keep more back than to relate." These are the ornaments of your words. And after this, if I say anything harsh about you, you immediately threaten me with proscription and swords. And meanwhile, most eloquent man, you play with rhetorical art, and pretend to pass over what you say, so that, being unable to prove your charges, you might make them seem criminal precisely by seeming to omit them.

This is the whole of your simplicity; thus do you spare a friend, and reserve yourself for the tribunals of judges, so that, while sparing me, you have heaped a mass of crimes upon me.

Do you wish to know the order of my departure from the City? I will relate it briefly. In the month of August, while the Etesian winds were blowing, with the holy presbyter Vincentius, and a young brother, and other monks who now dwell at Jerusalem, I boarded ship at the Roman port in safety, with a great crowd of saints escorting me. I came to Rhegium, and stood a little while on the Scyllaean shore, where I learned the old fables, the headlong course of guileful Ulysses, the songs of the sirens, and the insatiable whirlpool of Charybdis. And when the inhabitants of that place told me many things, and gave me counsel that I should sail not to the pillars of Proteus, but to the harbor of Jonah—for the former was the course of those fleeing and troubled, the latter of a man secure—I chose to proceed through the Maleas and the Cyclades to Cyprus.

There, received by the venerable bishop Epiphanius, in whose testimony you glory, I came to Antioch, where I enjoyed the communion of the bishop and confessor Paulinus, and, led by him in the depth of winter and in the severest cold, I entered Jerusalem. I saw many marvels; and what report had before brought to me, I confirmed by the judgment of my own eyes. Thence I hastened to Egypt, I visited the monasteries of Nitria, and among the choirs of saints I perceived asps lurking. Straightway with quickened step I returned to my Bethlehem, where I smelled the manger and the cradle of the Savior. I also saw the most famous lake, nor did I give myself over to idle leisure; but I learned many things which before I did not know.

But as to what was judged of me at Rome, and what was afterward written, I would not have you keep silent, especially since you have the testimony of the Scriptures, and I am to be convicted not by your words, which you can feign and boast of with unpunished falsehood, but by ecclesiastical documents. See how much I fear you: if you produce even a small scrap of writing against me from the Roman bishop, or from any other Church, I will confess as my own crimes all that has been written against you. Could not I also examine your journey? Of what age you were, whence, at what time you sailed? Where you lived? With whom you associated? But far be it from me to do what I reprove in you, and in an ecclesiastical dispute to compose the ravings of old wives' quarrels. Let it suffice to have said this much to your prudence, that you should beware of saying against another whatever can be immediately turned back upon yourself.

In the name of holy Epiphanius your evasion is marvelous, that after the kiss, after the prayer, you deny that he could have written against you: as if you were to argue that he could not have died, who had lived a little before, or that a rebuke of you is more certain than an excommunication after peace was given. "They went out from us," he says, "but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would surely have remained with us". The Apostle commands that a heretic, after one and a second warning, is to be avoided—one who, before he is avoided and condemned, was surely a portion of the ecclesiastical flock.

At the same time I cannot restrain my laughter, that when warned by a certain prudent man, you burst forth into praises of Epiphanius: "This is that raving old man, this is the anthropomorphite; this is the one who, in your presence, chanted six thousand books of Origen; who thinks that preaching against Origen in the languages of all nations has been laid upon him; who forbids him to be read for this reason, lest others recognize his thefts." Read your own writings, and his letter—nay, his letters—from which I will bring forward one testimony to your credit, so that you may not seem to have been praised by him now without cause. "But may God free you, brother, and the holy people of Christ entrusted to you, and all the brethren who are with you, and especially the presbyter Rufinus, from the heresy of Origen and other heresies, and from their destruction.

For if for one word, or two, contrary to the faith, many have been charged with heresy by the Church, how much more will he be held among heretics who has devised such perversities and such evil doctrines against the faith, and has stood forth as an enemy of God's Church!" This is the testimony of the holy man about you: thus adorned, thus praised, do you go about.

Such is the letter which you produced with gold coins from the bedroom of brother Eusebius, in order to slander the translator, and to hold me guilty of a most manifest crime, because I had translated "most honorable" as "dearest." But what is that to you, who with prudent counsel moderate everything, and so proceed in the middle course, that if you find people who will believe you, neither Anastasius nor Epiphanius wrote against you—unless the letters themselves cry out against this and break the boldness of your forehead—you immediately despise the judgment of both, and it does not matter to you whether they wrote or did not write, since they could not have written about an innocent and absent person. Nor should these evils be attributed to the holy man, as though it were shown that he gave peace with his mouth and a kiss, but kept evil and deceit in his heart." For thus you argue, and these are the words of your defense.

Both the whole world acknowledges that the letter against you is his, and we prove that the authentic copy came into your hands: and I marvel with what shame—nay, with what impudence—you deny what you do not doubt to be true. Will Epiphanius then be defiled, who gave you peace and kept deceit in his heart? Why should it not rather be true that he first admonished you? That he wished to correct you, and lead you back to the right path, so that he might not reject the kiss of Judas, so that he might break the betrayer of the faith by patience; and after he perceived that he was sweating in vain labor, and that neither could the leopard change its spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin, did he then set down in a letter what he had conceived in his mind?

You argue something similar against Pope Anastasius, namely that because you have a letter of Bishop Siricius, this man could not have written against you. I fear you may suspect that an injury has been done to you. I do not know how, being sharp and prudent, you have rolled down into these follies, so that while you think your readers foolish, you show yourself to be the fool. After a splendid piece of argumentation, you place at the close: "Far be this from holy men. Such things are wont to proceed from your school. You gave us peace as we were departing, and from behind you hurled darts armed with poison." And in this same display of prudence—nay, of declamation—you wished to be eloquent. We gave peace, we did not accept heresy. We joined right hands: we escorted you as you left, so that you might be catholics, not so that we might be heretics. Yet I wish to know what these poisoned darts are, which you complain we hurled at your backs.

Vincentius, Paulinianus, Eusebius, Rufinus, presbyters: of whom Vincentius came to Rome long before you; Paulinianus and Eusebius set out a year after your voyage; Rufinus was sent in the matter of Claudius after two years; all of them, either on account of family business, or on account of danger to another's life. Could we possibly have known that, as you were entering Rome, a noble man would dream of a ship full of merchandise entering with swelling sails? That not a foolish interpretation would resolve all questions against fate? That you would translate Eusebius's book on behalf of Pamphilus? That you would set your own lid, as it were, upon a poisoned dish? That you would translate that most notorious work On First Principles with the majesty of your eloquence? We sent accusers ahead of the crime, before you committed the thing to be accused—a new kind of calumny.

It was not, I say, it was not our design, but the providence of God, that men sent for another purpose should fight against a nascent heresy; and, after the manner of Joseph, should relieve a coming famine by the ardor of faith.

Into what will unbridled audacity not break forth once for all? He has cast someone else's crime upon himself, that we might seem to have invented it. What was said without a name, he refers to himself as said of himself, and, while excusing another's sins, he is secure only concerning his own innocence. For he swears that he did not write a letter to the Africans under my name, in which I confess that I was led astray by Jews, and translated falsehoods; and he sends books containing all the same things which he swears he did not know. And I marvel how his prudence has come to agree with another's wickedness, so that what another lied about in Africa, this man consistently states as true, and I do not know what unskilled person could imitate the elegance of his style. To you alone is it permitted to translate the poisons of heretics, and to serve all nations from the cup of Babylon.

You will emend the Latin Scriptures from the Greek, and hand down to the Churches something other than what they once received from the Apostles; but shall it not be permitted to me, after the Septuagint edition, which I most carefully corrected and gave many years ago to the men of my own tongue, to confute the Jews, to translate also those very copies which they themselves confess to be most true, so that if ever there is a dispute of Christians against them, they may have no byways of escape, but may be struck down chiefly by their own sword? I remember I have written more fully on this matter both in many other places and at the end of the second book, where I answered your accusation; and I have restrained by clear reasoning your popular appeal, by which you strive to stir up ill-will against me among the simple and unlearned; and I think the reader should be referred there.

I will not allow this to be passed over untouched, lest you grieve that the falsifier of your papers possesses with me the glory of a confessor, while you, guilty of the same crime, after Alexandrian exile and dark prisons, are named by all the followers of Origen a martyr and an apostle. I have already answered you concerning the excuse of your ignorance. But since you repeat the same things, and as if forgetful of your earlier defense, you again remind us that we should know that you, after devouring Greek volumes for thirty years, do not know Latin: attend for a moment—I am not finding fault with a few words in you (otherwise all your writing would have to be blotted out), but I wished to show your disciples, whom with great zeal you have taught to know nothing, that they might understand what shamelessness it is to teach what you do not know, to write what you are ignorant of, and to seek the same wisdom of the teacher even in the meanings.

And as to what you add, "that sins stink, not words, lying, calumny, detraction, false witness, and all revilings, and 'the mouth that lies kills the soul'", and you warn "lest that stench penetrate my nostrils," I would believe you saying this, were I not to find your deeds contrary—as if a fuller and a leather-tanner should warn a perfumer to pass by their shops with hardened nostrils. I will do, then, what you bid: I will close my nostrils, lest they be tormented by the most sweet odor of your truth and your blessings.

In praising and disparaging me, since you have shown yourself inconsistent, you have argued with wondrous cleverness, that it is as permissible for you to speak both well and ill of me, as it was for me to reprove Origen and Didymus, whom I had earlier praised. Hear then, wisest of men, and head of Roman dialectic, that it is not a fault for a man to praise one thing in others and to accuse another thing; but it is a fault to approve and disapprove the very same thing. Let me give an example, so that a prudent reader may understand with me what you do not understand. In Tertullian we praise his genius, but we condemn his heresy. In Origen we admire his knowledge of the Scriptures, and yet we do not accept the falsity of his doctrines. In Didymus, indeed, we both proclaim his memory and the purity of his faith concerning the Trinity; but in the other matters in which he wrongly trusted Origen, we withdraw from him.

For it is not the faults of teachers that are to be imitated, but their virtues. A certain African grammarian had, at Rome, a most learned man for a teacher; and he thought himself a rival of his master if he reproduced only the harshness of his tongue and the faults of his mouth. In the little preface to On First Principles you name me brother, and call me a most eloquent colleague, you proclaim the truth of my faith. These three things you will not be able to take away from me; carp at the rest as you please, lest you seem to contradict your own testimony about me. When you call me brother and colleague, you confess me worthy of your friendship. When you proclaim me eloquent, you no longer accuse me of ignorance. When you profess me catholic in all things, you will not be able to fasten upon me the charge of heresy. Apart from these three things, whatever you may find fault with in me, you will not seem to be contradicting yourself.

From this reckoning that total arises, that you err in reproving in me those things which you had earlier praised; and that I am not at fault, if in the same men I both proclaim what is praiseworthy and reprove what is blameworthy.

You pass on to the state of souls, and at greater length rebuke my "smoke," and, so that you may be permitted to be ignorant of what you deliberately pretend to know, you ask me first about heavenly things: how the Angels, how the Archangels exist? What or of what sort is their dwelling? What difference is there among them, or is there none at all? What is the nature of the sun; whence come the waxings and wanings of the moon; what or of what sort is the course of the stars? I marvel that you forgot to set down those little verses: Whence comes the trembling of the earth, by what force the deep seas swell, Their barriers burst, and again subside into themselves: The varied eclipses of the Sun, and the labors of the Moon; Whence the race of men, and of cattle: whence rain and fires, Arcturus, and the rainy Hyades, and the twin Bears. Why the winter suns hasten so to dip themselves in Ocean, Or what delay holds back the slow nights. (Virgil, Georg. II, 475; Aen. I, 746.)

Then, leaving the heavens, and descending to earthly things, you philosophize on lesser matters. For you ask me: "Tell us, what is the nature of springs? What of the winds? What is hail? What is rain? What is the salt sea? What are the sweet rivers? What are clouds, or showers, lightnings, or thunders, or thunderbolts?" So that, after I shall have answered that I do not know these things, you may safely be permitted to be ignorant about souls; and you may compensate for your ignorance of so many things by knowledge of one thing. Do you, who on every page fan at my "smoke," not perceive that we see your fogs and whirlwinds?

For, that you may seem to be something of a scholar, and among your Calpurnian disciples hold the glory of learning, you set the whole of Physics against me—as though Socrates had not vainly said, when passing over to ethics: "What is above us is nothing to us." Therefore, unless I render you a reason why the ant, a tiny animal, a mere point of a body, so to speak, has six feet, while the elephant, so great a mass, walks on four feet; why serpents and snakes glide upon their belly and breast; why the little worm which the common folk call the millipede swarms with so great a train of feet—shall I not be able to know about the state of souls? You ask me what I myself think about souls, so that as soon as I have professed it, you may immediately attack.

And if I should say that Ecclesiastical saying, "God works daily, and sends souls into the bodies of those being born," at once you bring forward the master's snares: and where then is the justice of God, that He should bestow souls upon those born of adultery and incest? Is He then a cooperator of evil men, and does He himself fabricate souls while adulterers sow bodies?—as though the fault of the seed lay in the wheat that is said to have been taken by theft, and not in him who stole the grain; and as though the earth ought not to cherish the seeds in its bosom, because the sower cast them with an unclean hand. Hence also comes that secret question of yours, why infants die, though they received bodies on account of sin. There exists a book of Didymus addressed to you, in which he answered you when you inquired, that they had not sinned much, and that it was enough that the prisons of their bodies merely touched them.

Our teacher and yours, at the time when you were asking him these things, dictated to me, at my request, three books of explanations on the prophet Hosea. From which it appears what he taught me, and what he taught you.

You urge that I answer concerning the nature of things. If there were space, I could tell you either the opinions of Lucretius following Epicurus, or of Aristotle following the Peripatetics, or of Plato and Zeno according to the Academics and the Stoics. And to pass over to the Church, where the rule of truth is, the book of Genesis and the Prophets and Ecclesiastes suggest to us many things concerning questions of this kind. Or if we are ignorant of these matters, how, concerning the state of souls, ought you to have confessed in your Apology your ignorance of all things, and asked your slanderers why they impudently demanded of you alone what they themselves did not know? O most wealthy trireme, which had come to enrich the poverty of the city of Rome with Eastern and Egyptian wares!

You are that Maximus, the One, who by writing restore the state of things for us.

Therefore, unless you had come from the East, that most learned man would still be stuck among the astrologers, and all Christians would be ignorant of what to say against fate. Rightly do you ask me about astrology, and the course of the heavens and the stars, you who brought a ship full of such great wares. I confess my poverty; I am not enriched as you were in the East. The Lighthouse taught you for a long time what Rome did not know; Egypt instructed you in what Italy has not had until now.

You write that among ecclesiastical writers there are three opinions concerning souls. One, which Origen follows. Another, which Tertullian and Lactantius follow (although concerning Lactantius you lie most openly); the third, which we simple and foolish men hold, we who do not understand that if it were so, God would be accused by us of injustice. And after this you swear that you do not know what the truth is. Tell me, I beg you: do you think that outside these three there is something in which the truth lies, and that in these three there is falsehood? Or that of the three one is true? If there is such a thing, why do you confine the freedom of disputants within so narrow a limit; and when you have set forth the lies, why are you silent about the truth? But if one of the three is true and the other two are false, why with a like ignorance do you not know the false along with the true?

Or do you dissemble the truth for this reason, that it may be safe for you, whenever you wish, to defend falsehoods? These are the smokes, these the mists, by which you try to take away the light from men's eyes. You, the Aristippus of our time, who bring into the Roman port a ship full of all sorts of wares, and with your public chair set up, display to us a Hermagoras and a Gorgias of Leontini: while you hasten to sail, you have forgotten in the East the merchandise of one little question. And again you cry out, and boast that you learned at Aquileia and at Alexandria, that God is the creator both of souls and of bodies. The question, forsooth, is being debated whether God or the devil made souls; and not whether souls existed before bodies, as Origen holds, and did something for which they are bound to gross bodies, or whether, in the manner of dormice, they slept, torpid and drowsy.

These things you keep silent, which everyone demands; and you answer those things which no one asks.

You also frequently mock my smokes, on the ground that I pretend to know what I do not know, and by an enumeration of the learned, mock the untutored crowd. You, forsooth, are fiery, nay rather thunderous, who thunder in speaking, and cannot hold the flames conceived in your mouth, and, like that Bar-Chochabas, author of the Jewish sedition, who fanned with his breath a lit stalk of straw in his mouth so that he might be thought to vomit flames: so also you, another Salmoneus to us, illuminate everything through which you proceed, and accuse us of being smoky, of whom perhaps it is said, "Who touches the mountains, and they smoke"; nor do you understand what smoke signifies in the Prophet regarding locusts, and that the beauty of your eyes cannot bear the bitterness of our smoke.

As to the charge of perjury, since you refer me to your own book, and I have already for the most part answered you and Calpurnius in other books, let it suffice now to have said briefly this: that you demand of a sleeping man what you never, waking, performed yourself. I am guilty of a great crime, if I told girls and virgins of Christ that secular books should not be read, and that I, warned in my sleep, promised not to read them. Your ship, promised to the city of Rome by revelation, promises one thing and accomplishes another. It had come to resolve the questions of the astrologers, and it dissolved the faith of Christians. That ship which had run with full sails through the Ionian and Aegean, the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian, was wrecked in the Roman harbor. Are you not ashamed to gather up such ravings, and to impose on me the necessity of objecting to similar things?

Granted, someone else had seen a glorious dream about you; it would have befitted your modesty and prudence to conceal what you had heard, and not to boast, as though it were great testimony, of another man's dream. See what a difference there is between your dream and mine. I report myself as humbly reproved; you repeat again and again that you have been boastfully praised. Nor can you say, "It matters nothing to me what another has seen," since in your most illustrious books you say you were moved to translate for this reason, lest an illustrious man should lose his dream about you. This is the whole of your endeavor: if you can teach me perjury, you yourself will not be a heretic.

I come to the gravest charge, in which, after friendships were reconciled, you accuse me of faithlessness. I confess that among all the reproaches which you either bring or threaten, nothing is to be repelled by me so much as fraud, deceit, faithlessness. For to sin is human; to lay snares is diabolical. Did we, then, join right hands at the Anastasis, when the lamb had been sacrificed, for this reason: that we might steal your papers at Rome? That dogs, let loose while you slept, might gnaw your uncorrected papers? And is this credible, that we had prepared accusers before you committed the crime? Did we, forsooth, know what you were turning over in your mind? What another had dreamed about you? So that the Greek proverb might be fulfilled in you, and the sow might teach Minerva. If I had sent Eusebius to bark, who stirred up the rage of Aterbius and the rest against you? Is he not the one who judged me also a heretic on account of my friendships with you?

To whom, when I had given satisfaction by condemning the dogmas of Origen, you, shut up at home, never dared to see him, lest you either condemn what you did not wish, or, openly resisting, incur the odium of heresy. Or can he not be a witness against you for the reason that he is your accuser? Before the holy Epiphanius had come to Jerusalem, and given you peace with his mouth indeed and a kiss, while keeping evils and deceits in his heart; before we dictated to him letters exposing you, so that he might write you down a heretic whom his eyes had approved as orthodox, Aterbius was barking against you at Jerusalem; and had he not gone away quickly, he would have felt the staff, not of your letters, but of your right hand, with which you are accustomed to drive away dogs.

"Why," he says, "did you take up my falsified papers? Why, after my translation, did you dare to set your pen to the books Περὶ Ἀρχῶν? If I had erred as a man, ought you not to have approached me with private letters, and so to flatter me, as I now flatter you in my letters?" This is my whole fault, that, accused by deceitful praises, I wished to clear myself, and this without invidiousness toward your name: that what you alone had accused, I referred to many, not casting the charge of heresy upon you, but repelling it from myself. Did I know that you would be angry if I wrote against heretics? You had said that you had removed the heretical matter from Origen's books: I believed you were no longer a supporter of heretics, and therefore I inveighed not against you, but against heretics; in which, if I was too vehement, forgive me. I thought that I would please you too.

You say that your papers were brought into the open by the theft and treachery of my servants—papers which lay hidden in your bedroom, or were with him alone to whom the matter had been entrusted. And how do you confess above that either no one had them, or very few? If they lay hidden in your bedroom, how were they with him to whom the matter had been entrusted? But if the one man to whom they had been written had undertaken to conceal them, then they did not lie hidden only in your bedroom, nor did the few have them whom you testified to have had them. You accuse me of having stolen them: and again you charge that they were bought for a great sum of money and countless wares. In one matter, and in one small letter, how much variety and dissonance of lying! Is it lawful for you to accuse, but not lawful for me to defend? When you accuse, you do not think of a friend.

When I answer, then the right of friendship comes into your mind. Tell me, I beg you, did you write the papers to be concealed, or to be published? If to conceal them, why did you write them? If to publish them, why did you conceal them?

But in this I am to be blamed: why have I not restrained your accusers, my friends? Shall I bring forth for you their letters, in which they accuse me of hypocrisy, because, knowing you to be a heretic, I kept silent; because, while unwarily offering peace, I undertook internal wars of the Church? You call them disciples, who suspect me of being your fellow-disciple. And because I was rather sparing in refuting your praises, they think me your fellow-initiate. Your preface did me this service, that you, as a friend, harmed me more than an enemy would have. They had once persuaded themselves (whether rightly or wrongly, let them see) that you are a heretic. If I wish to defend you, I shall accomplish only this: that they will accuse me equally with you. In short, they object to me your praise of me, and do not think that you wrote it treacherously, but sincerely: and what you formerly always praised in me, they now vehemently incriminate. What do you want me to do?

To have my disciples as accusers on your behalf? To receive in my own breast the darts hurled at a friend?

As for the books Περὶ Ἀρχῶν, you ought to thank me. For you, as you say, cutting away whatever was harmful, put in better things. I expressed them just as they stood in the Greek. From this both your good faith appears, and the heresy of him whom you translated. It was written to me from the City by men (Pammachius and Oceanus) preeminent in Christ: "Answer the accuser; lest, if you are silent, you seem to have consented." All with one voice demanded that I expose the wiles of Origen, that I show Roman ears the poisons of the heretics to be avoided. What does this have to do with an injury to you? Have you alone translated these books, and do you have no other partners in this work? Are you also among the Seventy translators, so that after your edition no one else may translate?

Behold, I too have translated many little books, as you say, from Greek into Latin: you also have the power to translate them again, as you wish; for both good and bad things are imputed to their own author. This would be the case with you too, had you not said that you cut away the heretical parts and translated the best. This is your knot, which cannot be untied. But if you erred as a man, condemn your former opinion.

But what will you do about your Apology, which you wrote on behalf of the works of Origen? What about the volume of Eusebius? In which, although you changed many things, and, under the name of a martyr, translated the writings of a heretical man: nevertheless you set down many things which do not agree with the faith of the Church. Do you also translate Latin books into Greek, and will you forbid us to give what is foreign to our own people? If I had answered in another work, in which you had not injured me, I might have seemed to translate what you had translated out of injury to you: so as to show you either unskilled or deceitful. But now here is a new kind of complaint: you are pained that answer has been made to you in the very matter in which I was accused by you. It was being said that Rome had been overturned by your translation; everyone demanded of me a remedy for this matter.

Not that I was of any importance; but those who asked thought me to be something. You were a friend, who had translated those things; what do you want me to do? Is it right to obey God rather than men? To guard the Lord's substance, or to conceal a fellow-servant's theft? Will I not appease you otherwise, unless I too commit with you things to be accused? If you had made no mention of my name; if you had not adorned me with distinguished praises, I could have had some refuge, and pleaded various excuses, so as not to translate again what had been translated. You, my friend, compelled me to waste several days on this work, so that I might bring into the open what Charybdis ought to have devoured: and yet, though injured, I preserved toward you the rights of friendship, and, as far as was in me, defended myself in such a way as not to accuse you.

You are too suspicious and querulous, who refer what is said against heretics to your own insult. But if I cannot otherwise be your friend, unless I am also a friend of heretics, I shall bear your enmity more easily than their friendship.

You also think that I have fabricated a new lie, that I composed a letter to you in my own name, as though written long ago, so that I might seem good and modest; a letter which you never at all received. This matter can very easily be proved. Many at Rome have copies of it, from about three years before this, who were unwilling to send it to you, knowing what you kept boasting about my name, and what unworthy and abominable things you were fabricating against the Christian purpose. I wrote unknowingly, as it were to a friend. They did not deliver it to one whom they knew to be an enemy: sparing both my error and your conscience. And at the same time you argue that if I had written such a letter to you, I ought not to have written many evil things against you in another little book.

This is your whole error, and this your unjust complaint: that whatever we say against heretics, you pretend was said against you; and unless we have spared them, you think yourself outraged. Do we then not give you bread, because we dash the heretics' brains against a stone? And so that you might not credit our letter, you say that Pope Anastasius's letter too rests upon a similar fraud, to which I have already replied to you: if you suspect it is not his, you have the means to convict us of falsehood before him. But if it is his, as this year's letters also prove against you, you strive vainly and falsely to prove it false, since from his true letter we show ours to be true.

How elegant you wished to seem in excusing your lie: and lest you produce the six thousand books of Origen, you demand of me monuments of Pythagoras. Where is that confidence with which, with puffed-out cheeks, you so frequently trumpeted that you had corrected in the books Περὶ Ἀρχῶν what you had read in Origen's other books, and had rendered to their authors what was not another's but their own? Out of so great a forest of books you cannot produce a single shrub or twig. Those were true smokes, these are mists, which, while you charge them upon me, you know through me to have been extinguished and dispersed upon yourself; and yet you do not lower your broken neck, but with greater impudence than ignorance you say that I deny what is plain, so that though you promised mountains of gold, you cannot produce even a leather coin from your treasures. I recognize just hatred against me, and you rave against us with a true madness.

For unless I boldly demanded what does not exist, you would seem to have what you do not have. You demand of me the books of Pythagoras. Who indeed told you that his volumes exist? Are not these the words in my letter, which you criticize? "But suppose I erred in my youth, and, trained in the studies of philosophers, that is, of the Gentiles, was ignorant at the beginning of the faith of Christian doctrines, and supposed of the Apostles what I had read in Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles." I spoke of their doctrines, not of their books, which I could learn from Cicero, Brutus, and Seneca. Read the little speech for Vatinius, and others where mention is made of the associations. Turn over Cicero's dialogues. Look upon the whole shore of Italy, which was once called Magna Graecia: and you will recognize the Pythagorean doctrines engraved on public bronze tablets. For whose are those "golden precepts"? Are they not Pythagoras's?

In which all his teachings are briefly contained, and on which the philosopher Iamblichus commented in a most extensive work, imitating in part Moderatus, a most eloquent man, and Archippus and Lysis, hearers of Pythagoras. Of these, Archippus and Lysis held schools in Greece, that is, at Thebes, who, retaining the teacher's precepts in memory, used their own intellect in place of books, from whom comes this saying: "By every device must be driven away and cut off with fire and iron and every kind of contrivance—disease from the body, ignorance from the soul, extravagance from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the household, and, in common, excess from all things." Which we may render into Latin thus: "By all means must be driven away and cut off—sickness from the body, ignorance from the mind, luxury from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the household, and in common from all things, intemperance." These too are Pythagorean precepts: That all things of friends are common.

And that a friend is another self: and that especial care must be taken of two times, morning and evening, that is, of what we are about to do and of what we have done. That after God, truth is to be cultivated, which alone makes men near to God. And those riddles, which Aristotle most diligently pursues in his books: Do not step over the balance, that is, do not transgress justice. Do not stir the fire with a sword. That is, do not provoke with abusive words a mind that is angry and swollen. The crown is by no means to be plucked, that is, the laws of cities are to be preserved. The heart is not to be eaten, that is, grief is to be cast out of the mind. When you have set forth, he says, do not turn back; that is, after death do not long for this life. Do not walk on the public road; that is, do not follow the errors of the many.

A swallow is not to be received into the house; that is, chattering and wordy men are not to be kept under the same roof. To those who are burdened, a burden is to be added; from those who are laying it down, it is not to be shared; that is, to those advancing toward virtue, precepts are to be increased: those who give themselves to idleness are to be left alone. And since I had said that I had read Pythagorean doctrines, hear what Pythagoras first discovered among the Greeks. That souls are immortal, and pass from one body into others. Which indeed Virgil, following him, says in the sixth book of the Aeneid: All these, when they have rolled the wheel through a thousand years, God calls forth to the river Lethe in a great throng; So that, forgetful, they may revisit the vault above, And begin again to wish to return into bodies.

That he himself was first Euphorbus, second Callides, third Hermotimus, fourth Pyrrhus, and at last Pythagoras: and that after certain cycles of time, things that had been come to be again: and that nothing appears new in the world. That philosophy is the meditation of death: that it daily strives to lead forth the soul's freedom from the prison of the body: matheseis anamneses, learnings are recollections; that is, that learnings are recollections; and many other things which Plato pursues in his books, and especially in the Phaedo and the Timaeus. For after the Academy and countless disciples, feeling that much was lacking to his teaching, he came to Magna Graecia, and there, instructed in the doctrine of Pythagoras by Archytas of Tarentum and Timaeus of Locri, he mingled the elegance and charm of Socrates with these disciplines, all of which, under a changed name, Origen is proven to have transferred into his books Περὶ Ἀρχῶν.

In what then did I err, if as a young man I said that I had supposed of the Apostles what I had read in Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles? Not, as you slanderously pretend and invent, in the books of Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles, but what I had read as having been in them, and what the writings of others taught me they had held. And this manner of speaking is very frequent: as if I should say, what doctrines I read in Socrates, I thought true. Not that Socrates wrote any books; but what I read in Plato and other Socratics that he had held. And again, I wished to imitate the deeds which I had read in Alexander and Scipio. Not that they themselves wrote down their own deeds; but that I read in others what I admired that they had done.

Therefore even if I could not prove that monuments of Pythagoras himself exist, nor establish it by his son and daughter and other disciples, you would not convict me of a lie, because I said I had read doctrines, not books: and that you err in vain, wishing to shield your own lie, so that unless I produce one book of Pythagoras, you will have lost six thousand books of Origen.

I will come to the epilogues, that is, your curses, in which you urge me to repentance; and unless I am converted, that is, unless I remain silent under your accusation, you threaten me with destruction. And you declare that this scandal will redound upon my own head, since I, by my response, provoked you, a most gentle man and of Mosaic meekness, to the madness of writing. For you boast that you know crimes which I confessed to you alone as my closest friend, and that you will bring these into the open; and that I am to be painted in my own colors, and ought to remember that I once lay at your feet, lest with the sword of your mouth you should cut off my head. And after many things, in which you exult like a madman, you call yourself back, and say that you desire peace, with this one condition, that henceforth I be silent, that is, that I not write against heretics, nor dare to answer your accusation.

If I do this, I shall be a brother and colleague, and a most eloquent man and friend and companion, and, what is greater than these, you will judge everything that I have translated from Origen to be catholic. But if I mutter, and stir myself, forthwith I shall be impure and a heretic, and unworthy of your friendship. These are my praises; thus you exhort me to peace, and you do not even allow grief its groans and tears in freedom.

I too could paint you in your own colors, and rage against one raging; and say whatever I either know or do not know: and with the same license, or rather fury and madness, heap up things false or true, so that both I might be ashamed to speak and you to hear; and cast in your teeth things which would condemn either the accuser or the accused; so that from hardness of face I might win the reader's belief, so that what I wrote shamelessly might be judged to be truly written. But far be it from Christian morals, that while seeking the blood of others, they offer their own; and, without a sword, be murderers in will. This suits your goodness, your gentleness and simplicity, who from one dunghill of the breast bring forth both the scent of roses and the stench of corpses: and, contrary to the prophetic sentence, call bitter what you had praised as though sweet.

Nor is it necessary that in ecclesiastical treatises we should air the business of the courts; and you will hear nothing further on this, except that saying from the crossroads: "When you have said what you wish, you will hear what you do not wish." Or if a common proverb seems base to you, and, being a most wise man, you delight rather in the sayings of philosophers and poets, read that Homeric line: "Whatever word you speak, such a one you shall hear in return."

This alone I ask of your exceptional holiness and censure (whose purity is such that demons roar at your handkerchiefs and aprons), whose example do you follow in writing? Which of the catholics ever, in a dispute over sects, cast up shameful things against the one against whom he disputed? Did your teachers so instruct you? Were you trained in such disciplines, that you should take off the head of one you could not answer; and cut out the tongue that cannot be silent? Nor do you greatly glory, if you do what scorpions and blister-beetles can do. Fulvia did this to Cicero, and Herodias to John: because they could not bear the truth, and pierced the truth-speaking tongue with a hairpin. Dogs bark for their masters, and do you not wish me to bark for Christ? Many have written against Marcion, Valentinus, Arius, and Eunomius. By whom was shameful conduct cast up against them? Did they not all devote themselves wholly to convicting the heresy?

These are the devices of heretics, that is, of your teachers, that, when convicted of perfidy, they betake themselves to abuse. Thus Eustathius, bishop of Antioch, found others too, though he knew them not. Thus Athanasius, bishop of the city of Alexandria, cut off Arsenius's third hand. For he who was earlier pretended to be dead was afterward shown, while living, to have two hands. Such things your fellow-disciples and teachers now grant concerning a priest of the same Church.

They invent: and with gold, that is, with your own resources and those of your party, they assail the truth of the faith. What shall I say of heretics, who, though outside, yet call themselves Christians? Against the most impious Celsus and Porphyry, how many of ours have written? Who, setting aside the case, occupied himself with a superfluous charge of crimes? Which things ought to be contained not in ecclesiastical writings but in the briefs of judges. Or what does it matter, if you lose the case, and prevail by accusation? There is no need for you to accuse at the risk of your own head. By hiring one assassin, you can well satisfy your desire. And you pretend to fear scandal, you who long ago were a brother, now an accuser, always an enemy, and ready to kill.

And yet I marvel how you, a prudent man, overcome by fury, wish to bestow a benefit upon me, that you may lead my soul out of prison, and not allow it to remain with you in the darkness of this age.

Do you then wish me to be silent? Then do not accuse me. Lay down your sword, and I will cast away my shield. In one thing I shall not be able to agree with you, namely, that I should spare heretics, that I should not prove myself catholic. If this is the cause of discord, I can die, but I cannot be silent. I ought indeed to answer your madness out of all Scripture, and to soothe the fury of your breast with divine utterances, after the manner of David playing the harp; but I will be content with a few testimonies from a single book, and I will set wisdom against folly, so that, if you despise human things, you may at least not neglect divine ones. Hear, then, what the wise Solomon says of you, and of all the envious, and slanderous, and abusive: The foolish, while greedy for injuries, being made wicked, hate understanding. Devise not evil against your friend. And be not at enmity with a man without cause. The impious exalt reproach.

Cut off from yourself a wicked mouth, and put unjust lips far from you: the eyes of the reproachful, the tongue of the unjust, hands shedding the blood of the just, a heart devising evil thoughts, and feet swift to do evil. He who relies on a lie feeds on winds, and follows flying birds. For he has forsaken the ways of his own vineyard, and has caused the boundaries of his tillage to go astray. He walks through what is dry and desert, and gathers barrenness with his hands. The mouth of the insolent draws near to destruction; and he who utters curses is most foolish. Every simple man is a blessed soul: the spirited man is dishonorable. Through the sins of his lips the sinner falls into a snare. The ways of fools are right in their own sight. The fool shows his anger the same day. Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord. He who guards his mouth keeps his soul. And he who is rash with his lips shall terrify himself.

The wicked man does evil with reproach, and the fool spreads abroad his malice. You will seek wisdom among the wicked, and will not find it. The rash man shall be sated with his own ways. The wise man by fearing turns away from evil. The fool, being confident, mingles with it. The patient man is abundant in prudence: the faint-hearted is exceedingly imprudent. He who slanders the poor provokes his Maker. The tongue of the wise knows good things, and the mouth of fools proclaims evil. The spirited man stirs up quarrels: and every one who exalts his heart is unclean before God. The hand that unjustly strikes another hand shall not go unpunished. He who loves his life spares his mouth. Reproach goes before destruction, and evil thought before ruin. He who hardens his eyes devises perverse things, and provokes all evils with his lips. The lips of the fool lead him into evils, and the bold mouth calls upon death. The malicious man shall suffer many losses.

Better is the poor just man than the lying rich man. It is glory to a man to turn away from revilings: but he who is foolish binds himself to such things. Love not to detract, lest you be uprooted. Sweet to a man is the bread of falsehood; but afterward his mouth shall be filled with gravel. He who amasses treasures with a lying tongue pursues vain things, and shall come into the snares of death. Speak not anything in the ear of a fool, lest perhaps the wise mock at your words. A club, and a sword, and a piercing arrow are destructive; so also is the man who bears false witness against his friend. As birds fly away, and sparrows; so a vain curse shall not come upon him. Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him: but answer a fool according to his folly, lest he seem wise to himself. He who lies in wait for his friends, when he is discovered, says: I did it in jest.

Coals for the fire, and wood for the flame, and a slanderous man for kindling strife. If your enemy asks you, sparing his voice, do not consent to him: for there are seven wickednesses in his soul. Heavy is a stone, and sand scarcely to be borne; but the wrath of a fool is heavier than both, cruel is indignation, and anger is sharp, and zeal is impatient. The impious man slanders the poor: and he who trusts in the boldness of his heart is most foolish. The fool utters all his wrath: the wise man dispenses it by parts. A wicked son has swords for teeth, and knives for jaws, that he may consume the weak from the earth, and the poor from among men. Taught then by these examples, I did not wish to bite the biter, nor to inflict a like retaliation: rather I preferred to charm away the madness of the raging one, and to pour the antidote of a single book into his poisoned breast.

But I fear that, accomplishing nothing, I shall be compelled to sing that saying of David, and to console myself with these words: The wicked are estranged from the womb, they have gone astray from the belly. They have spoken falsehoods, their fury is after the likeness of the serpent: like the deaf asp, that stops her ears, that she may not hear the voice of the charmers, and of the wizard that charms wisely. God shall break their teeth in their mouth; the Lord shall shatter the jaws of the lions. They shall come to nothing, like water running away. He has bent his bow, until they be weakened. Like wax that melts, they shall be taken away: fire has fallen upon them, and they have not seen the sun. And again: The just man shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance of the wicked: he shall wash his hands in the blood of the sinner. And man shall say: If indeed there is fruit for the just, surely there is a God who judges them on earth.

At the end of your letter you write in your own hand: "I wish you to love peace." To which I shall briefly reply: If you desire peace, lay down your arms. I can yield to one who flatters, I do not fear one who threatens. Let there be one faith between us, and peace will follow at once.