Rufinus of Aquileia

Tyrannius Rufinus was born around 345 AD at Concordia, near Aquileia in northern Italy. He went to Rome for his education and there formed a friendship with Jerome — a friendship that shaped, and eventually consumed, much of his later life. Returning north, he was baptized at Aquileia around 370 AD and joined the circle of ascetics gathered there, which included Chromatius, later bishop of the city and the man who would commission some of Rufinus's most consequential work.

In 373 AD Rufinus went east with Melania the Elder, the Roman aristocrat who had turned her wealth toward the monastic life. He settled for several years in Egypt, studying under Didymus the Blind at Alexandria and traveling among the desert monks. Around 380 AD he and Melania founded a monastery on the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem, and he was later ordained presbyter by John, bishop of Jerusalem. He remained in Palestine for the better part of two decades, reading Greek theology at first hand and building the library and the linguistic command that would define his later career.

Those years also placed him inside the first Origenist controversy. Jerome, by then settled at Bethlehem, broke with John of Jerusalem over the orthodoxy of Origen's teaching; Rufinus stood with John. The two old friends were formally reconciled at Jerusalem in 397 AD, and Rufinus returned to Italy the same year. At Rome in 398 AD he translated Origen's On First Principles into Latin, adjusting passages he said had been corrupted by heretical hands, and prefaced the work by recalling Jerome's own earlier praise of Origen. Jerome read the preface as an attempt to enlist him on the wrong side of a quarrel he had publicly abandoned. He produced his own literal translation of Origen's treatise to expose what Rufinus had smoothed over, and the two men exchanged the sharpest polemics of their careers: Rufinus's Apology Against Jerome in two books in 401 AD, and Jerome's Against Rufinus in three.

The controversy reached the papal court. Pope Anastasius I summoned Rufinus to Rome; from Aquileia in 400 AD he sent instead the Apology to Anastasius, a short statement of his own faith in which he set out his belief in the Trinity, the resurrection of the flesh, and the final judgment, and explained that a translator is not the author of the opinions he renders. Anastasius condemned Origen's writings but declined to condemn Rufinus, leaving the question of his intentions to his own conscience.

Between 399 and 407 AD Rufinus worked at Aquileia and produced the body of translation for which he is chiefly read. At Chromatius's request he rendered Eusebius's Church History into Latin, compressing its tenth book and adding two books of his own carrying the narrative down to 395 AD. He translated the Historia Monachorum, an account of the Egyptian desert fathers drawn from the world he had seen himself; homilies and commentaries of Origen; the Rule and homilies of Basil; orations of Gregory Nazianzen; the Clementine Recognitions; the Sentences of Sextus; and Pamphilus's Apology for Origen. In the same years he wrote two original works: the Commentary on the Apostles' Creed, dedicated to Bishop Laurentius, and the Blessings of the Patriarchs, written for Paulinus of Nola.

Alaric's invasion of Italy drove him out. In 407 and 408 AD Rufinus fled to Rome and then south with the household of Melania the Younger. He died in Sicily, at Messina, in 411 AD, having watched from across the strait as Reggio burned.

His method as a translator was frankly interpretive. He abridged, expanded, harmonized, and corrected what he took to be corruptions in his Greek texts, and said so in his prefaces. Modern scholarship therefore reads him with care where the Greek survives. Where it does not — and for On First Principles, much of it does not — his Latin is the only text there is.