Letters 81 to 90: The Break with Rufinus and the Campaign Against Origen

Your letter, showing you to be a possessor of the Lord's inheritance—he who, going to the Father, said to the Apostles: "My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you"—has also testified that you are a partaker of that blessedness in which "the peacemakers" are called blessed. You caress as a father, you teach as a master, you instruct as a bishop. You have come to us not in the austerity of the rod, but in the spirit of kindness and gentleness and meekness: so that from your very first word you might echo the humility of Christ, who saved the race of mortals not by thundering and lightning, but by wailing in a manger, and by keeping silence on the cross.

For you had read what was foretold in his type: "Remember, O Lord, David, and all his meekness"; and afterward presented in Christ himself: "Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart." Hence too, touching on many things from the sacred volumes in praise of peace, and flying, bee-like, over the various fields of Scripture, you have gathered with skillful eloquence whatever was sweet and fitted to concord. We were therefore roused, running toward peace: with sails spread for the voyage, the frequent breeze of your exhortation filled them; so that not with reluctant and fastidious throats, but with eager and full ones, we might drink the sweet streams of peace.

2. But what are we to do, in whose power lies only the will for peace, not its accomplishment? And although the will too has its reward with God according to its purpose, yet an unfinished work saddens with grief even those who are willing.

Knowing this, the Apostle too says—namely that the most perfect peace consists in the will of both parties: "As much as in you lies, having peace with all men." And the prophet: "Peace, peace. And where is peace?" For it is no great thing to hold forth peace with the voice, and destroy it by deed; to strive for one thing, to show another; to sound concord in words, to exact servitude in fact. We too wish for peace; and not only do we wish it, but we ask for it. But the peace of Christ, true peace, peace without enmities, peace in which no war is wrapped up; peace which does not subject adversaries, but joins friends. Why do we call domination peace, and not render to each thing its own name? Where there is hatred, let it be called enmity; where there is charity, there only let peace be named.

We neither rend the Church, nor are we divided from communion with the fathers: but from our very cradle, so to speak, we have been nourished on catholic milk. For no one is more churchly than he who has never been a heretic. But we do not know peace without charity, nor communion without peace. We read too in the Gospel: "If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there thou remember that thy brother hath something against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go first to be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift." If we cannot offer our gifts without peace, how much more the Body of Christ? With what conscience shall I approach the Eucharist of Christ, and answer Amen, while I doubt the charity of the one who offers it?

3. I beg you to hear me patiently, and not think truth to be flattery. Does anyone commune with you unwillingly?

Does anyone, with hand outstretched, turn away his face, and amid the sacred banquet hand Judas his morsel? At your coming, I think, no crowd of monks is prepared; rather it rejoices: since they come forth to meet you in rivalry, and, issuing from the hiding-places of the desert, they desire to outdo you in humility. Who compels them to come forth? Is it not love of you? Who gathers into one those scattered through the desert? Is it not your affection? For a parent ought to love. A parent and a bishop ought to be loved, not feared. It is an ancient saying: whom one fears, one hates; whom one hates, one wishes dead. Hence too in our own writings, though the beginnings of little ones consist in fear, perfect love casts out fear. You do not seek to have monks subject to you: therefore you have them the more subject. You offer a kiss, they bow their necks.

You show yourself a soldier, and win a leader, as if being one among many, you were one of the many. Liberty quickly grows indignant, if oppressed. No one gains more from a free man than he who does not compel him to servitude. We know the ecclesiastical canons. We are not ignorant of the ranks of each order: both by reading and by daily examples we have learned much, up to this age, and experienced much. He who scourges with scorpions, and thinks he has thicker fingers than his father's loins, quickly scatters the kingdom of the meek David. Certainly the Roman people did not endure pride even in a king. That leader of the Israelite army, who had afflicted Egypt with ten plagues, and at whose command heaven and earth and seas were obedient, is proclaimed the meekest of all men whom the earth then brought forth. And therefore he held the leadership for forty years, because he tempered the pride of power with gentleness and meekness.

He was stoned by the people, and prayed for those who stoned him; indeed he wished rather to be blotted out of the book of God, lest the flock entrusted to him should perish. For he desired to imitate that Shepherd whom he knew would carry even the straying sheep upon his shoulders. "The good shepherd," it is said, "lays down his life for his sheep." Indeed the disciple of the good shepherd wishes to be anathema for his brethren and kinsmen, who are Israelites according to the flesh. And if he desires to perish, that the lost may not perish: how much more must good parents take care not to provoke their children to wrath, and by excess of harshness compel even the gentlest to become harsh?

4. The letter compels me to speak more briefly, my grief to speak longer. He writes in those letters of his—peaceful, as he wishes them to be thought, but, as I feel them, most biting—that he has never been injured by me, nor called a heretic.

In what way, then, does he injure me, tossing about the charge that I am sick with a most grievous malady, and rebellious against the Church? Provoked by others, does he run to spare his adversaries, and to injure one who does not injure him? Before my brother (Paulinianus) was ordained, he never said that there had been any question of doctrine between himself and the holy Pope Epiphanius. And what reason compelled him, as he himself at last writes, to dispute among the people about a matter which no one was asking about? For your prudence knows that questions of this kind are dangerous, and that nothing is safer than silence, unless perchance it is necessary to speak of great matters. Was that talent and river of eloquence really so great, that in one single treatise of the Church he says he has comprehended everything, concerning which we know that the most learned men have written countless thousands of verses, each on a single point? But what is that to me?

Let him who heard know it, let him who wrote it be aware of it, nor let him free even himself from the accusation. I was neither present nor did I hear it. I am one of the people; nay, not even one, since, while many cried out, I kept silent. Let us compare the persons of accuser and accused: and to whichever merit, or life, or doctrine has gone before, let us give the greater credence.

5. Do you see how, with closed eyes as it were, I touch lightly upon the chief points: not so much expressing eloquently what I have conceived in mind, as indicating what I pass over in silence. I have understood and approved your management, in that, taking counsel for the peace of the Church, you pass through, as it were, with ears stopped against Siren songs.

Otherwise, since from an early age you have been trained in the sacred letters, you know in what sense each thing is said: how, in ambiguous statements, your speech is so weighed as neither to condemn what is another's, nor to deny what is ours. But pure faith and open confession do not seek subterfuges and quibbles of words. What is believed simply ought to be confessed simply. I could indeed freely proclaim, and even amid Babylonian swords and fires say: why is a different answer given from what is asked? Why is there no simple, open confession? Everything is feared, everything is tempered, everything is left ambiguous, and he walks as it were upon the tips of the ears of grain. But out of zeal and expectation of peace, with boiling temper, he answers not as questions are put to him. Others freely wound, whom, wounded himself, he does not dare to wound. I meanwhile keep silence: now I too will feign either my own management, or ignorance, or fear.

What will he do to me, accusing him, who, as he himself testifies, disparages even one he praises?

6. His whole letter is full, not so much of exposition, as of insults against us. My name, without any of those courtesies with which men are wont to stroke one another in turn, is repeatedly taken up, picked at, tossed about, as though I had been blotted out of the book of the living; as though his letters had disgraced me; or as though I had ever sought such trifles, I who, shut up from adolescence in the cells of a monastery, have wished rather to be something than to seem so. Certain of us he addresses with such honor that he lacerates them, as if we too could not say what no one keeps silent about. He charges that a slave has been made a cleric, though he himself has not a few clerics of that sort; and has he not read that Onesimus, born again amid Paul's bonds, began to be a deacon from being a slave?

He calls me a sycophant, and, lest he be compelled to prove it, says he has only heard it said. Oh, if it were also permitted to me to say what many are crying out, and to give ear to the slanders of others; he would already understand that we too know what all know, and that I too hear what no one is ignorant of. He says that rewards have been restored to him as if for calumny. Who would not shudder at such a subtle and cunning wit? Who could answer such a thunderbolt of eloquence? Which is greater—to endure calumny, or to commit it? To accuse one whom you will afterward love, or to grant pardon to one who has sinned? Which is less to be borne—that a sycophant be made an aedile, or a consul? He himself knows what I am keeping silent, what I am saying, what I too have heard—and what, perhaps, for fear of Christ, I do not believe.

7. He charges me with having translated Origen into Latin.

I did not do this alone, but the Confessor Hilary did it too: and yet each of us, cutting away whatever was harmful, translated what was useful. Let him read it himself, if he knows how (for I suppose that from constant conversation and daily association with Latins he is not ignorant of the Roman tongue), or if indeed he has not thoroughly imbibed it, let those who are accustomed to do so interpret it for him, and then he will know that I am to be praised precisely for that which he criticizes. For just as I have always attributed the interpretation and idioms of the Scriptures to Origen, so I have most consistently removed the falsity of his doctrines. Do I count Origen among the crowd? Do I count the other Treatise-writers with him? I know that the Apostles are one thing, the rest of the Treatise-writers another. That the former always speak the truth, while the latter, in certain matters, err as men.

It is a new kind of defense, thus not to deny the faults of Origen, in such a way as to accuse others along with him. Namely, since you dare not defend him openly, you shield him by alleging a similar error common to many. No one could read the six thousand volumes of Origen, which he did not write: and I believe it easier that the witness to this statement lied, than its author.

8. He says that my brother (Paulinianus), a man who rests quietly in the cell of a monastery, is the cause of discord; and he interprets the clericate not as an honor, but as a burden. And while he has up to the present day beguiled us with a feigned show of peace, he has stirred the ears of the Western Priests, saying that this man, a mere youth and almost a boy, was made a Presbyter in his own parish of Bethlehem. If this is true, all the Bishops of Palestine are not ignorant of it.

For the monastery called “the Old,” after the name of the holy Pope Epiphanius, in which my brother was ordained Presbyter, is situated in the territory of Eleutheropolis, and not in that of Aelia. Moreover, his age is known to Your Beatitude, and since he has already reached the span of thirty years, I think it should not be censured on this score, since according to the mystery of the manhood assumed in Christ it is perfect. Let him recall the ancient Law, and he will see that from the Levitical tribe men were chosen for the Priesthood after twenty-five years. Or if in this testimony alone he follows the Hebrew Truth, let him know that one becomes a Priest at thirty years. And lest he perhaps say, “Old things have passed away, and all things are made new”, let him hear along with Timothy: “Let no man despise thy youth”. Certainly, when he himself was ordained Bishop, he was not far in age from that at which my brother now stands.

Or if this is permitted in Bishops, but not in Presbyters, lest by antiphrasis they seem to differ from their own name: why did he himself ordain as Presbyter a minister either of his own age or younger, and what is more, belonging to another Church? But if he cannot have peace with my brother except with a subject, one who renounces the Bishop of his own ordination, he shows that he desires not so much peace, as vengeance under the pretext of peace; nor is he content with the leisure of quiet and peace otherwise than by having whole what he threatens. Even if he himself had ordained him, and thus, as a lover of retirement, wished to remain quiet, he should exercise no authority over him at all. But if he were splitting the Church, he would owe him nothing beyond the honor due to all Priests.

9. Thus far has his apology—nay rather, his accusation, and his tattered discourse against us—been drawn out.

To this I indeed replied briefly, and in passing, in a letter, so that from what I have said he may understand what I have left unsaid; and may know that we are human beings, a rational animal, and that he can understand our prudence: nor are we so dull of heart that, like brute animals, we hear only the sound of words and not their meaning. Now I beg you to grant pardon to my grief; and if it is proud to have answered, it is much prouder to have accused. Although I answered in such a way that I have indicated my silence rather than a discourse. Why do they seek peace from afar, and wish it to be imposed on us by others? Let them be peaceable, and peace will follow at once. Why do they misuse the name of Your Holiness against us as a means of intimidation, when your letter breathes peace and gentleness, while their words threaten harshness?

Indeed, how peaceable and conducive to concord were the letters you sent us through the Presbyter Isidore, we prove from this: that those who falsely boast of peace have refused to return them. Let them choose therefore what they wish: either we are good, or we are bad. If good, let them allow us to rest in peace: if bad, why do they seek fellowship with the bad? He has learned by experience how much humility avails. He who now separates what by his own counsel he once joined together proves that he now, at another’s will, tears apart what he then joined.

10. Recently he demanded and obtained exile for us: and would that he had been able to carry it out, so that, just as the will is imputed to him in place of the deed, so we too might have the crown of exile not only in will, but also in effect. By shedding blood, and by suffering rather than inflicting injuries, the Church of Christ was founded.

She grew by persecutions, she was crowned by martyrdoms. Or if only these among whom we dwell love severity, and know not how to endure persecution but to inflict it: there are here also Jews; there are Heretics of various sects, and above all the most impure Manichaeans—why do they not dare to injure any of these even with a word? Do they wish to expel us alone? Are we alone, who commune with the Church, said to be splitting the Church? I ask you, is not this a fair demand, that either they expel those along with us, or they keep us along with them? Except that in this they honor more those whom at least they separate from the Heretics by exile. A monk, alas, both threatens and obtains exile against monks, and this a monk who boasts that he holds the Apostolic See. This nation does not know how to yield to terror, and it bows its neck rather than its hands to the impending sword.

For what monk who is exiled from his homeland is not already an exile from the world? What need is there of public authority, and the expense of rescripts, and journeys over the whole world? Let him but touch us with his little finger, and we will go forth of our own accord. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof”. Christ is not confined to any one place.

11. Moreover, as to what he writes, that we, through you and the Roman Church, are in communion with him from whom we seem to be separated by communion: there is no need to go so far afield, for here too in Palestine we are joined to him in the same way. And lest this seem far off, in the little village of Bethlehem we are united in communion, as far as lies in us, with his Presbyters.

From which it is evident that a personal grievance is not to be considered the cause of the Church: nor is the ill humor of one man—nay, through him, of others—to be called by the general name of the Church. Wherefore what I said at the beginning of the letter, I repeat even now: that we wish for the peace of Christ, we desire concord: and I ask you to admonish him not to extort peace, but to wish it. Let him be content with the grief of our past injuries. Let him at least blot out the old wounds with new charity. Let him be such as he was before, when he loved us of his own accord. Let words not flow from him out of another’s ill humor. Let him do what he himself wishes, and not what he is compelled to wish. Either, as a pontiff, let him command all equally; or, as an imitator of the Apostle, let him serve the salvation of all equally.

If he shows himself such, we willingly extend our hands, we stretch out our arms; let him have friends and kinsmen; and let him perceive that in Christ, as to all the Saints, so also to him, we are subject. “Charity is patient, charity is kind, charity does not envy, is not puffed up, endures all things, believes all things”. Charity is the mother of all virtues; and, as it were, a threefold cord, the Apostle’s saying is strengthened, declaring: faith, hope, charity. We believe, we hope: and thus through faith and hope, we are bound together by the bond of love. For this reason we too left our native lands, that we might live quietly, without any strife, in the fields and in solitude: that we might venerate the Pontiffs of Christ (who nevertheless preach the right faith) not out of fear as of masters, but with the honor due to fathers; that we might defer to Bishops as Bishops, and not, under another’s name, be compelled to serve others whom we do not wish to serve.

We are not so puffed up in heart as to be ignorant of what is owed to the Priests of Christ. For he who receives them does not so much receive them, as Him whose Bishops they are. But let them be content with their own honor. Let them know themselves to be fathers, not lords, especially among those who, having spurned the ambitions of the world, prefer nothing to quiet and leisure. May Christ, Almighty God, grant to your prayers that we may be united not by a feigned name of peace, but by a true and faithful love: lest, biting one another, we be consumed one by another.

Pammachius and Oceanus to Jerome the presbyter, greeting. A certain holy brother brought to us the papers of a certain man, which contained a volume of Origen, entitled On First Principles, translated into the Latin tongue. And since in these there are many things which trouble the slenderness of our understanding, and which we judge to be spoken in a less than catholic manner, we suspect also that, for the excuse of the Author, much has been withdrawn from his books which could have shown his manifest impiety; we beseech Your Excellency to deign to devote your effort in this matter especially—not so much for our sake, as for that of all who dwell in the City—that you may faithfully make known, in your own rendering, the aforesaid book of Origen, just as it was published by its Author, and that you may expose what has been interpolated by his defender.

And also, whatever in these papers which we have sent to Your Holiness has been published either contrary to the catholic rule or unskillfully, you may refute and confute. Indeed, subtly, in the Preface to his work, he made mention—the name of Your Holiness being suppressed—that the work promised by you he himself had completed: obliquely implying that you too think in like manner. Purge, therefore, the suspicions of men, and confute the accuser, lest, if you dissemble, you seem to consent.

Jerome to Pammachius and Oceanus, Brothers, Greeting.

1. The little writings which you sent afflicted me with an honorable insult, so praising my talent as to take away the truth of my faith. And because good men both at Alexandria and at Rome, and in almost the whole world, are wont to bandy about the same things in connection with my name; and love me so much that heretics cannot exist without me; I will set aside personalities: I will answer only as to facts and charges. For it does not profit one's cause to revile back those who revile, and to bite back at adversaries in kind, when one is commanded not to render evil for evil, but to overcome evil with good: to be filled with reproaches, and to offer the other cheek to him who strikes.

2. They object to me, why I once praised Origen.

Unless I am mistaken there are two passages in which I praised him: the little preface to Damasus for the Homilies on the Song of Songs, and the Prologue to the book of Hebrew Names. What is said there about the doctrines of the Church? What about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? What about the resurrection of the flesh? What about the state and substance of the soul? Simple interpretation and teaching was praised with a simple word. Nothing there touches upon faith, nothing upon doctrines. Only a moral topic is treated, and the cloud of allegory is dispelled by a clear exposition. I praised the interpreter, not the dogmatist: the talent, not the faith: the philosopher, not the apostle. But if they wish to know my judgment about Origen, let them read the Commentaries on Ecclesiastes: let them go over the three volumes on the Epistle to the Ephesians, and they will understand that I have always opposed his doctrines.

For what folly is it, so to praise someone's learning that you also follow his blasphemy? Blessed Cyprian too uses Tertullian as a master, as his writings prove; and though he delights in the talent of that learned and ardent man, he does not follow Montanus and Maximilla along with him. Apollinarius wrote most powerful books against Porphyry: Eusebius wove together a beautiful ecclesiastical history; yet one of these introduced a halved economy of Christ, the other is the most open champion of the impiety of Arius. Woe, says Isaiah, to those who call good evil, and evil good, and who make the bitter sweet, and the sweet bitter. Neither should the good qualities of adversaries be disparaged (if they have anything honorable), nor should the vices of friends be praised; and everything must be judged not by persons but by the weight of the matter. Lucilius too is bitten at, because he runs with an unmetrical foot; and yet his wit and charm are praised.

3. When I was young, I was carried along by a wondrous ardor for learning, and, contrary to the presumption of certain people, I did not teach myself. I heard Apollinaris of Laodicea frequently at Antioch, and cultivated him; and though he instructed me in the holy Scriptures, I never took up his contentious doctrine about the sense of Scripture. Already his head was sprinkled with grey hairs, and it befitted him rather to be a master than a disciple. Yet I went on to Alexandria, I heard Didymus: in many things I give him thanks. What I did not know, I learned; what I knew, I did not lose, with him teaching. Men thought I had made an end of learning. I came again to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. With what labor, at what price did I have Baraninas as a nocturnal teacher! For he feared the Jews, and showed himself to me as another Nicodemus. Of all these I frequently make mention in my little works. Certainly the doctrine of Apollinaris and of Didymus is contrary to each other.

Let each faction then drag me to its own side, since I confess both as masters. If it is expedient to hate men, and to detest some nation, I am opposed with a wondrous hatred to the circumcised. For even to this day they persecute our Lord Jesus Christ in the synagogues of Satan. Let someone object to me, why I had a Jewish man as a teacher? And does anyone dare to bring forward my letters to Didymus, as though to a Master? A great crime of a disciple, if I called a learned and old man master! And yet I wish to examine that very Epistle, which has been kept so long in reserve for calumny. It contains nothing but honor and greeting. These things are foolish and frivolous. Rather accuse me where I have defended heresy, where I have praised a depraved doctrine of Origen.

In the reading of Isaiah, in which two Seraphim are described crying out, he interpreting them as the Son and the Holy Spirit, did I not change that detestable exposition into the two Testaments? The book is in hand, published twenty years ago. So many of my little works, and especially the Commentaries, according to the opportunity of the passages, tear apart the pagan sect. But as to what they object, that I have gathered his books beyond all men: would that I had the volumes of all commentators, that I might compensate for slowness of talent by diligence of reading. I gathered his books, I confess; and for that very reason I do not follow his errors, because I know all that he wrote. Believe one who has experienced it, as a Christian speaking to Christians: his doctrines are poisoned, foreign to the holy Scriptures, doing violence to the Scriptures. I have read, I say, I have read Origen; and if it is a crime to read, I confess it; and Alexandrian paper has emptied our purse.

If you believe me, I was never an Origenist; if you do not believe me, I have now ceased to be one. But if not even thus you are led to belief, you compel me to write in my own defense against your beloved one: so that if you do not believe me denying, you may at least believe me accusing. But people more willingly believe me erring than corrected. Nor is it strange, for they think me to be their fellow-initiate, and that on account of the animal and earthy ones I am unwilling to confess the doctrines openly. For it is their own decree, that pearls are not readily to be cast before swine, nor what is holy to be given to dogs, and to say with David: I have hidden thy words in my heart, that I might not sin against thee. And in another place about the just man: He who speaks, it says, truth with his neighbor, that is, with those who are of the household of the faith.

From which they wish it to be understood that we, who are not yet initiated, ought to hear a lie: lest, being little ones and infants, we be choked by the eating of more solid food. But that they are bound together among themselves by orgies of perjuries and lies, the sixth book of the Stromateis (in which he composes our doctrine out of the opinions of Plato) most plainly teaches.

4. What then shall I do? Shall I deny that I am of the same doctrine? They will not believe. Shall I swear? They will laugh, and say: these things are born at home for us. I will do the one thing they most guard against, that I bring their sacred rites and mysteries into the open, and that all their cunning, by which they mock us simple folk, be laid bare: and let those who do not believe the denying voice, at least believe the accusing pen. For this above all they guard against, lest at some time their writings be held against their own author.

They readily swear, only afterward to loose it by another perjury. When it comes to subscription, they turn evasive, and seek subterfuges. One says, I cannot condemn what no one has condemned. Another, Nothing has been decreed on this by the Fathers: so that while the authority of the whole world is invoked, the necessity of subscribing is deferred. A certain one more boldly says, How shall we condemn those whom the Nicene Synod did not touch? For that which condemned Arius would certainly also have condemned Origen, if it had disapproved his doctrines. As if, forsooth, they ought to have cured all diseases with one remedy at once; and therefore the majesty of the Holy Spirit is to be denied, because in that Synod there was silence about His substance. The question then was about Arius, not about Origen: about the Son, not about the Holy Spirit. They confessed what was being denied; they were silent about what no one was asking.

Although secretly they struck at Origen, the fountain of Arius; for in condemning those who deny the Son to be of the substance of the Father, they equally condemned him along with Arius. Otherwise, by this argument, neither Valentinus, nor Marcion, nor the Cataphrygians, nor Manichaeus ought to be condemned: because the Nicene Synod does not name them: though it is certain they existed before the Synod. But if ever they begin to be pressed, and either subscription is required of them or departure from the Church, you would see wondrous tricks. They so temper their words, so invert the order, and arrange every ambiguity, that they hold both our confession and that of the adversaries, so that they are heard one way by a heretic, another way by a catholic. As though it were not by the same spirit that the Delphic Apollo, and Loxias, poured forth oracles to Croesus and to Pyrrhus at different times, but mocking with an equal trick? For example's sake I will add a few instances.

5. We believe, they say, in the future resurrection of bodies. If this is said properly, it is a pure confession. But because there are heavenly bodies and earthly ones, and this air and thin breeze, according to their nature, are called bodies, they put "body," not "flesh," so that the orthodox hearer, hearing "body," may think "flesh"; the heretic may recognize "spirit." This is their first snare: which, if it is detected, they arrange other tricks, and feign innocence, and call us malicious, and, as though believing simply, say: We believe in the resurrection of the flesh. But when they have said this, the uninstructed crowd thinks this sufficient for itself, especially because the same thing is also believed in the Creed. If you inquire further, a murmur of the circle is stirred up, the partisans cry out: You have heard "resurrection of the flesh," what more do you seek? And, with their zeal turned to the opposite, we are called sycophants, they simple folk.

But if you have hardened your brow, and begin to press, holding the flesh with your fingers, whether they say that very flesh will rise which is seen, which is touched, which walks and speaks; first they laugh, then they nod assent. And when we ask whether hair and teeth, chest and belly, hands and feet, and the rest of the limbs, the resurrection will present whole and entire: then indeed they cannot contain themselves for laughter, and, opening their mouths with a guffaw, they bring up to us barbers and pastry-cooks, and physicians, and cobblers as necessary. And they ask further, whether we believe that the genitals of both sexes will also rise, our cheeks shaggy, women's smooth, and the habit of the body diverse according to the distinction of male and female. But if we grant this, they immediately demand the womb and coitus, and the rest that is in the belly and beneath the belly. They deny the individual members, and say that the body, which consists of members, rises.

6. This is not the time to hurl rhetorical speech against a perverse doctrine. Not the rich tongue of Cicero would suffice me, not the fervent oration of Demosthenes could fill the fervor of my mind, if I wished to expose the frauds of the heretics, who, confessing the resurrection in word, deny it in mind. For their little women are wont to hold their breasts, applaud their belly, handle their loins and seed and rotting armpits, and say: What good does the resurrection do us, if a fragile body will rise? And being like the Angels in the future, we shall have the nature of Angels. They disdain, it seems, to rise with the flesh and bones, with which Christ also rose.

But suppose I erred in my youth, and, trained in the studies of the philosophers, that is, of the Gentiles, was ignorant at the beginning of my faith of Christian doctrines: and thought this about the Apostles which I had read in Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles: why do you follow the error of a little one and a nursing infant in Christ? Why do you learn impiety from him who did not yet know piety? The second plank after shipwreck is simply to confess one's fault. You have imitated me erring, imitate me now corrected. We erred as youths, let us be amended as old men. Let us join our groans, let us join our tears, let us weep, and turn to the Lord who made us: let us not wait for the repentance of the devil. That presumption is vain, and drags one into the depths of hell: here either life is sought, or it is lost.

If I never followed Origen, in vain do you seek to defame me; if I was his disciple, imitate the penitent. You believed me confessing: believe me also denying.

7. If you knew these things, as you say, he says, why did you praise him in your little works? And today I would praise him, unless you were praising his errors: his talent would not displease me, unless his impiety pleased certain persons. And the Apostle bids: Reading all things, holding fast that which is good. Lactantius in his books, and especially in the letters to Demetrianus, denies altogether the substance of the Holy Spirit, and says, with Jewish error, that he is referred either to the Father or to the Son, and that the sanctification of both persons is signified under his name. Who can forbid me to read his books of Institutions, in which he wrote most powerfully against the gentiles, because the aforementioned opinion is detestable? Apollinarius wrote outstanding volumes against Porphyry; I approve the man's labor, though I despise his foolish doctrine in many respects.

Confess also that Origen erred in certain matters; and I will do no more. Say that he thought ill of the Son, worse of the Holy Spirit; that he impiously set forth the fall of souls from heaven; that he confesses the resurrection of the flesh in word only, but destroys it otherwise by his assertion; and that, after many ages, and one restitution of all things, Gabriel will be the very same as the devil; Paul the same as Caiaphas; virgins the same as prostitutes. When you have rejected these things, and separated them from the faith of the Church as with a censor's rod, I will safely read the rest; nor will I fear poisons, once I have drunk the antidote beforehand. It will not harm me if I say: Origen, though he surpassed all in his other books, surpassed even himself in the Song of Songs; nor will I dread the judgment by which I once, as a young man, called him a teacher of the Churches.

Unless perhaps I ought to have accused, at whose request I was translating his little works, the man whose books I was interpreting, and said in the preface: This man whose books I am interpreting is a heretic; beware, reader, lest you read him: flee the viper: or if you wish to read him, know that what I have translated has been corrupted by wicked men and heretics; though you need not fear, for I have corrected everything that had been vitiated. This is, in other words, to say: I who interpret am catholic; he whom I interpret is a heretic. Finally you too, quite simply and candidly and without malice, thinking little, of course, of the precepts of rhetoric and the tricks of orators, while confessing that his books On First Principles are heretical, and wishing to transfer the crime onto others, have cast into the minds of readers a scruple, so that they examine the whole life of the author, and form a conjecture about the present question from his other books.

I, being clever, who corrected the text, keeping silent about what I wished, and concealing the charges, brought no odium upon the accused. Physicians too say that great diseases are not to be cured, but left to nature, lest the remedy aggravate the sickness. It is nearly one hundred and fifty years since Origen died at Tyre. Which of the Latins ever dared to translate his books on the resurrection, On First Principles, the Stromateis and the Tomoi? Who wished to bring infamy upon himself through an infamous work? We are neither more eloquent than Hilary, nor more faithful than Victorinus, who translated his treatises not as interpreters but as authors of their own work. Recently Saint Ambrose so compiled his Hexaemeron that he followed rather the opinions of Hippolytus and Basil.

I myself, whose rivals you say you are, and toward whom you hold the eyes of a mole compared to others but of a lynx toward me, if I had been ill-disposed toward Origen, would have translated those very books which I mentioned above, so as to make his evils known even to the Latins; but I never did so, and though many asked me, I refused to comply. For I am not accustomed to insult the errors of those whose genius I admire. Origen himself, if he were still alive, would be angry with you, his defenders, and would say with Jacob, You have made me hateful in the world.

8. Does someone wish to praise Origen?

Let him praise as I praise: a great man from infancy, and truly the son of a martyr: he held the ecclesiastical school at Alexandria, succeeding the most learned man, Clement the presbyter: he fled pleasures to such a degree that, out of zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, he cut off his own genitals with a knife: he trampled avarice underfoot: he held the Scriptures by memory, and toiled day and night in the study of explaining them. He delivered a thousand and more homilies in the Church: he published besides innumerable commentaries, which he himself calls tomoi, and which I now pass over, lest I seem to be weaving a catalogue of his works. Which of us can read as much as he wrote? Who would not marvel at a mind so ardent in the Scriptures? But if some zealous Judas should object to us his errors, let him hear freely:

Sometimes even great Homer nods.
But in so long a work it is permitted that sleep should creep in.

Let us not imitate his vices, whose virtues we cannot follow. Others have erred in the faith, Greeks as well as Latins, whose names it is not necessary to bring forward, lest I seem to defend him not by his own merit, but by the error of others. This, you will say, is not to excuse Origen, but to accuse the others. Rightly said, if I did not say that he erred, if in the depravity of faith I believed that even the Apostle Paul, or an angel from heaven, ought to be heeded. But now, since I frankly confess his error, I will read him as I do others, because he erred as others did. But you may say: if the error is common to many, why do you persecute him alone? Because you alone praise him as an apostle. Take away the excess of love, and we will take away the greatness of hatred.

The faults of others you excerpt from their books only for this purpose, that you may defend his error: but Origen you extol to heaven in such a way as to say he erred in nothing at all. Whoever you are, defender of new dogmas, I beg you to spare Roman ears: spare the faith which has been praised by the voice of the Apostle. Why do you strive to teach us, after four hundred years, what we did not know before? Why do you bring forth into the open what Peter and Paul were unwilling to publish? Up to this day the Christian world has been without this doctrine. As an old man I will hold the faith in which as a boy I was reborn. They call us Pelusians, and men of clay and animal and carnal, because we do not receive the things which are of the spirit; they, forsooth, being Jerusalemites, whose mother is in heaven.

I do not despise the flesh, in which Christ was born and rose again: I do not scorn the clay which, baked into a most pure vessel, reigns in heaven; and yet I marvel why, while detracting from the flesh, they live carnally, and cherish and delicately nourish their enemy, unless perhaps they wish to fulfill the Scripture that says: Love your enemies: do good to them that persecute you. I love flesh that is chaste, virgin, fasting: I love not the works of the flesh, but its substance: I love flesh that knows itself to be subject to judgment: I love that flesh which for Christ is struck down, torn, burned in martyrdom. 10. As for what they assert, that his books have been corrupted by certain heretics and malicious men, how absurd this is can be proved from the following. Who more prudent, more learned, more eloquent than Eusebius and Didymus, defenders of Origen, can be found?

Of whom one, in six volumes of his Apology, affirms that Origen thought as he himself does; the other so strives to excuse his errors that he nevertheless admits them to be his, not denying what was written, but explaining the sense of the writer. It is one thing if certain things were added by heretics; it is another if someone defends them as if well said. Origen alone has been found whose writings, in the whole world, were falsified, and, as if by letters of Mithridates, all the truth was erased from his volumes in a single day. If one book was corrupted, could all his works, which he published in different places and at different times, be corrupted at once?

Origen himself, in the letter he wrote to Fabian, bishop of the city of Rome, did penance for having written such things, and lays the blame for his rashness on Ambrose, because he brought into public what had been published in private: and why then do they still cry "borrowed shields," saying that whatever displeases is foreign to him? 11. Further, as to their bringing forward Pamphilus as his eulogist, I thank them on my own behalf, for having judged me worthy to be slandered together with a martyr. For if you say that Origen's books were corrupted by his enemies in order to defame him, why may I not say that a volume was composed under the name of Pamphilus by his friends and followers, in order to vindicate him from infamy by the testimony of a martyr? Behold, you correct in Origen's books what he did not write: and do you marvel if someone publishes a book which he did not publish?

You can be convicted in a published work: he, who published nothing else, more easily lies open to slander. Produce any other work of Pamphilus: you will find none anywhere: this is the only one; how then am I to know that it is Pamphilus's? Will the style and the drivel, forsooth, teach me? I will never believe that a learned man dedicated the first fruits of his talent to questions and to infamy: and the very name "apologetic" reveals an accusation: for nothing is defended, except what lies under a charge. I will now bring forward one point, to contradict which would be either foolish or shameless. This book, which is called Pamphilus's, contains the beginning of the sixth book of Eusebius's defense of Origen, up to nearly a thousand lines. And in the rest, the writer of the same work brings forward testimonies by which he strives to prove that Origen was catholic.

Eusebius and Pamphilus had such concord between them that you would think them men of one soul, and that the one took his name from the other. How then could they disagree between themselves, so that Eusebius, in his whole work, proves Origen to be of Arian doctrine, and Pamphilus a defender of the Nicene synod, which came afterward? From which it is shown that the little work belongs either to Didymus, or to some other, who, having cut off the head of the sixth book, joined the remaining members to it. But let us grant, over and above what is due, that it is Pamphilus's, yet not that of the martyr; for he wrote it before he underwent martyrdom. And how, you will say, was he worthy of martyrdom? Namely so that by martyrdom he might blot out his error, so that by the shedding of his blood he might purge one fault. How many martyrs throughout the whole world, before they were slain, lay under various sins?

Let us then defend sins, because those who afterward were martyrs, were first sinners. 12. These things, most beloved brothers, I have dictated in swift speech in reply to your letter, overcoming my resolve not to write against him whose talent I had formerly praised: preferring to risk my reputation rather than my faith. My friends have brought this upon me, that if I keep silent, I am judged guilty; if I reply, I am judged an enemy. Both conditions are hard; but of the two I will choose the lighter: enmity can be healed again, blasphemy deserves no pardon. What labor I endured in translating the books On First Principles, I leave to your judgment; since to change anything from the Greek is not the work of one translating, but of one overturning; and to render the same things word for word is by no means the part of one who wishes to preserve the grace of the language.

You provoke me to write by your voice, you frighten me by your eloquence; and in epistolary style you almost represent Tully. As to your complaint, that I send you brief and unadorned little letters, this does not come from carelessness, but from fear of you, lest, speaking to you at too great length, I send you many things deserving reproof: and, to confess simply to your holy mind, at one single sailing-season toward the West, so many letters are demanded of me at once, that if I wished to write back everything to each one, I could not manage it. Hence it happens that, setting aside elegance of composition and the writer's diligence, I dictate whatever comes to my mouth; and I consider you only a friend of my sayings, not a judge.

2. Your letter set before me two little questions.

One: Why the heart of Pharaoh was hardened by God; and the Apostle said: Not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth; but of God that showeth mercy, and the rest, which seem to take away free will. The other: How can they be holy who are born of the faithful, that is, of the baptized, since without the gift of grace afterward received and kept, they cannot be saved.

3. To the first Origen replies most forcefully in the books On First Principles, which I have recently translated at the bidding of our Pammachius: detained by this work, I was unable to fulfill what I had promised you, and I have again postponed our Daniel. And indeed, though at the wish of my most beloved and excellent friend Pammachius, I would still have deferred it to another time for his sake alone, had not almost the whole brotherhood from the City demanded the same, asserting that many were in danger, and were acquiescing in perverse doctrines.

Wherefore I was compelled by necessity to translate books in which there is more of evil than of good: and to keep this measure, that I should neither add nor take away anything, and should preserve Greek faithfulness with Latin integrity. Copies of these you will be able to borrow from the aforesaid brother: though the Greek should suffice for you, and you ought not to seek the muddy little streams of my poor talent, you who drink from the very fountains themselves.

4. Moreover, since I am speaking to a learned man, one trained both in the divine Scriptures and in the literature of the world, I wish your dignity to be reminded of this, lest you think that I reject all things which Origen wrote in the manner of a boorish jester—a charge his ἀκαιροσπουδασταὶ (untimely zealots) bring against me—as though they were accusing Dionysius the Philosopher of suddenly changing his opinion; but rather that I only repudiate his depraved dogmas.

For I know that they lie under equal condemnation who call good things evil, and those who judge evil things good; who make bitter sweet, and sweet bitter. Or what stubbornness is this, so to praise someone's teaching that you follow his blasphemy?

5. Concerning your second question, Tertullian discussed it in his books On Monogamy, asserting that the children of the faithful are called holy, because they are, as it were, candidates of the faith, and are polluted by no filth of idolatry. At the same time consider that we read of the sacred vessels in the tabernacle, and other things pertaining to the rite of ceremonies, which certainly cannot be holy, except those things which perceive and venerate God. It is, therefore, an idiom of the Scriptures, that at times they name as holy those who are clean and purified and expiated: just as Bathsheba is written to have been sanctified from her uncleanness, and the Temple itself is named the Sanctuary.

6. I beseech you, do not, by a silent judgment of your mind, accuse me either of vanity or of falsehood. For God is my witness, upon my conscience, that the aforesaid necessity drew me back from the very outset and beginning of the interpretation; and you yourself know that nothing is done well which is done with a preoccupied mind. I gladly received the small cap, brief in its weave, but most ample in charity, to comfort my aged head, rejoicing both in the gift and in the giver of the gift.

Jerome to The Most Blessed Pope Theophilus. 1. Lately I received the writings of your Beatitude, amending our long silence, and calling me to my customary duty. Wherefore, although through the holy brothers Priscus and Eubulus your discourse to us had ceased, yet because we have seen them, stirred by zeal for the faith, swiftly traverse the regions of Palestine, and pursue the scattered petty kings (Basilisks) even to their hiding-places, I write briefly, that the whole world may exult, and glory in your victories: and that the standard of the cross raised up at Alexandria, and the shining trophies against heresy, may be beheld by the rejoicing throng of peoples. Well done for your courage, well done for your zeal for the faith: You have shown that your silence until now was a dispensation, not a consent. For I speak freely to your Reverence. We grieved that you were too patient, and, not knowing the helm of the master, we were eager for the ruin of the lost.

But, as I see, you raised your hand for a long time, and suspended the blow, that you might strike the more forcefully. Concerning the reception of a certain person, you ought not to be aggrieved against the Bishop of this city; for you commanded nothing in your letters, and it would have been rash to pass sentence about a matter he did not know. Yet I think that he neither dares, nor wishes, to harm you in anything.

Bishop Theophilus to his most dear and most loving brother Jerome, Presbyter. The holy Bishop Agatho, together with the most beloved Deacon Athanasius, has been sent on ecclesiastical business; and when you have learned of it, I do not doubt that you will approve our zeal, and rejoice in the Church's victory. For certain wicked and frenzied men, wishing to sow and establish the Origenist heresy in the monasteries of Nitria, have been cut down by the prophetic sickle. For we remembered the Apostle admonishing: "Rebuke them sharply." Hasten, therefore, you too, to receive your part of this reward, correcting with fitting words of Scripture those who have been deceived. We desire, if it can be done, in our own days to preserve the catholic faith and the rules of the Church among the peoples subject to us, and to silence all new doctrines.

Jerome to The Most Blessed Pope Theophilus.

A twofold grace have the letters of your Beatitude bestowed upon me: that they had for their bearers the holy and venerable Bishop Agatho and the Deacon Athanasius, and that they showed forth zeal for the faith against a most wicked heresy. The voice of your Beatitude has resounded throughout the whole world, and, while all the Churches of Christ rejoice, the poisons of the devil have fallen silent. No longer does the ancient serpent hiss; but, twisted and disemboweled, hiding in the darkness of caverns, he cannot bear the bright sun. Indeed, concerning this matter, even before you wrote, I had sent letters to the West, pointing out to men of my own tongue the wiles on the part of the heretics. I think it was by God's dispensation that at the same time you also wrote to Pope Anastasius, and, without knowing it, confirmed our own judgment. But now, admonished by you, we shall apply ourselves more diligently, that here too and afar we may recall the simple from error.

Nor let us fear to incur the hatred of certain persons; for we ought not to please men, but God: although the heresy is defended more ardently by them than it is attacked by us. At the same time I beg you: if you have any synodical documents, send them to me, that, strengthened by the authority of so great a Pontiff, I may open my mouth more freely and confidently for Christ. The Presbyter Vincentius came from the City two days before I sent this letter, and greets you humbly, and repeatedly celebrates in his speech how Rome, and almost the whole of Italy, has been freed by your letters, after Christ. Strive on, then, most loving and most blessed Pope, and on every occasion write to the Western bishops, that they may not cease to cut down with the sickle the evil, sharp shoots, as you yourself indicate.

Bishop Theophilus to his most dear and most loving brother Jerome, Presbyter, his lord. I have learned—something your holiness also knows—of the monk Theodore, and I have approved his zeal: for when he was setting out from us to sail to Rome, he would not depart before embracing and visiting you and the holy brothers who are with you in the monastery, as though they were his own flesh. When you have received him, rejoice for the tranquility of the Church. For he has seen all the monasteries of Nitria, and can report the continence and gentleness of the monks: how, with the followers of Origen extinguished and put to flight, peace has been restored to the Church, and the Lord's discipline is preserved. And would that among you also those who are said secretly to be undermining the truth might lay aside their hypocrisy: concerning whom the brothers in those regions, not thinking well of them, have prompted me to write these things.

Wherefore beware, and flee men of this kind, according to what is written: If anyone does not bring to you the Church's faith, do not even bid him hail. Although I do these things superfluously in writing this to you, who are able to recall the erring from error; Yet it does no harm for prudent and learned men also to be admonished out of concern for the faith. I wish all the brothers who are with you to be greeted in my name.

Theophilus to his most dear brother and fellow-bishop Epiphanius, his lord. The Lord, who spoke to the Prophet: "Behold, I have set you today over nations and kingdoms, to root up, and to pull down, and to destroy, and again to build and to plant," bestows the same grace upon his Church at every season: that the whole body may be preserved, and that in nothing the poisons of heretical dogmas may prevail. This indeed we now see fulfilled. For the Church of Christ, "which has neither spot nor wrinkle, nor any such thing", has cut down with the evangelical sword the serpents of Origen coming forth from their caverns, and has freed, according to the report of the monks of Nitria, the flock from the pestilent contagion. A few, then, of the things that have been done I have included, as far as the shortness of time allowed, in a general letter which I directed to all in common.

It belongs to your dignity, which has often fought before us in struggles of this kind, both to console those set in the battle-line, and to gather together the bishops of the whole island; and to send synodical letters, both to us and to the Bishop of the city of Constantinople, and to any others you may think fit, so that by the consent of all, Origen himself by name, and his nefarious heresy, may be condemned. For I have learned that the calumniators of the true faith, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius, raging with a new fury on behalf of heresy, have sailed to Constantinople, in order both to deceive any new persons they can, and to join themselves to the old associates of their impiety.

Let it therefore be your care to make known the order of events to all the bishops throughout Isauria and Pamphylia, and the other provinces nearby; and to attach our letter, if you think it worthy, so that all, gathered together in one spirit, may, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver them over to Satan for the destruction of the impiety which possesses them. And that our writings may reach Constantinople the more swiftly, send an energetic man, and someone of the clergy, just as we too have sent from the monasteries of Nitria itself fathers of the monks, together with other holy and most continent men, who can teach all present what has been done; and above all we beseech you to pour forth earnest prayers to the Lord, that we may be able to obtain the victory in this struggle also.

For no small joy has spread through the hearts of the peoples both in Alexandria and throughout all Egypt, since a few men have been cast out, so that the body of the Church might remain pure. I greet the brothers who are with you. The people who are with us greet you in the Lord.