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TOPIC: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 03 (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 23.03.10 Book II Part 2
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23. You see by this what his opinions are about Origen and also about Ambrose. If he should deny that his strictures apply to Ambrose, which every one knows, he will be convicted in the first place by the fact that there is a Commentary of his on Luke which is current among the Latins, and none by any other hand. But secondly he knows that I possess a letter of his in which, while he discharges others, he makes his strictures fall upon Ambrose. But, since that letter contains certain more secret matters, I do not wish to see it published before the right time; and therefore I will corroborate what I say by other proofs similar to it. In the meantime let this be counted as demonstrated by what I have said above, that he extols Origen's writings as in every way admirable, and declares that `if he translates them, the Roman tongue will then recognize what a store of good it had hitherto been ignorant of and now has begun to understand,' that is the twenty six books on Matthew, the five on Luke, and the thirty two on John. These are the books to which he gives the highest honour; and in these absolutely everything is to be found which is contained in the books on Peri =Arkwn the groundwork of his charges against me, only set forth with greater I breadth and fulness. If then he promises that he will translate these, why does he condemn me for a similar course? But now I have undertaken to prove how violently he attacks a man who is worthy of all admiration, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who was not to that church alone bat to all the churches like a column or an impregnable fortress. I will therefore set forth a Preface of his by which you may see in what foul and unworthy terms he assails even a man of such eminence, and also how he praises Didymus to the sky, though he has since cast him down even to the infernal region; and further how he speaks of the city of Rome, which now through the grace of God is reckoned by Christians as their capital, words which were only applicable when its inhabitants were a nation who were heathens and princes who were persecutors.
24. The Preface is that for the treatise of Didymus on the Holy Spirit. It is addressed to Paulinianus, and is as follows.
"While I was an inhabitant of Babylon, a settler in the land of the purple harlot, and lived under the law of the Quirites, I attempted to write some poor stuff about the Holy Spirit and dedicated the work to the Pontiff of that city. When on a sudden that pot which Jeremiah saw after the almond rodhyperlink began to seethe from the face of the North; and the whole senate of the Pharisees raised a clamour and no mere imaginary scribe but the whole faction of the ignorant as if I had declared war against them, laid their heads together against me. I therefore returned with all speed to Jerusalem, like a man going back to his home, and, after having lived in sight of the cottage of Romulus and the Lupercalhyperlink with its naked games, I am now in sight of Mary's inn and the Saviour's cave. And so, Paulinianus my dear brother, since the aforenamed Pontiff Damasus, who had impelled me to undertake this work, now sleeps in the Lord, it is here in Judea that I warble the song which I could not sing in a strange land, provoked thereto by you and by Paula and Eustochium those handmaids of Christ whom I revere, and aided by your prayers; for this land which bore the Saviour is more august to me than that which bore the man who slew his brother.hyperlink I have in the title ascribed the work to its true authors for I preferred to be known as the translator of another man's work than to imitate certain people and, like the ungainly jackdaw, deck myself in another bird's plumage. I read some time ago the treatise of a certain person on the Holy Spirit, and I recognized then, according to the sentence of Terence,hyperlink bad things in Latin taken from good things in Greek. There is nothing in it of close reasoning, nothing downright and manly, such as draws us into assent even against our will, but all is flaccid and soft, sleek and pretty, picked out with the rarest colours. But Didymus,hyperlink my own Didymus, who has the eyes of the bride in the Song of Songs, those eyes which Jesus bade us lift up upon the whitening fields, looks afar into the depths, and has once more given us cause to call him, as is our wont, the Seer Prophet. Whoever reads the work will recognize the plagiarisms of the Latins, and will despise the derivative streams, as soon as he begins to drink at the fountain head. He is rude in speech, yet not in knowledge;hyperlink his very style marks him as one like the apostle as well by the grandeur of the sense as by the simplicity of the words."
25. You observe how he treats Ambrose. First, he calls him a crow and says that he is black all over; then he calls him a jackdaw who decks himself in other birds' showy feathers; and then he rends him with his foul abuse, and declares that there is nothing manly in a man whom God has singled out to be the glory of the churches of Christ who hashyperlink spoken of the testimonies of the Lord even in the sight of persecuting kings and has not been alarmed. The saintly Ambrose wrote his book on the Holy Spirit not in words only but with his own blood; for he offered his life-blood to his persecutors, and shed it within himself, although God preserved his life for future labours. Suppose that he did follow some of the Greek writers belonging to our Catholic body, and borrowed something from their writings, it should hardly have been the first thought in your mind, (still less the object of such zealous efforts as to make you set to work to translate the work of Didymus on the Holy Spirit,) to blaze abroad what you call his plagiarisms, which were very possibly the result of a literary necessity when he had to reply at once to some ravings of the heretics. Is this the fairness of a Christian? Is it thus that we are to observe the injunction of the Apostle,hyperlink "Do nothing through faction or through vain glory"? But I might turn the tables on you and ask,hyperlink Thou that sayest that a man should not steal, dost thou steal? I might quote a fact I have already mentioned, namely, that, a little before you wrote your commentary on Micah, you had been accused of plagiarizing from Origen. And you did not deny it, but said: "What they bring against me in violent abuse I accept as the highest praise; for I wish to imitate the man whom we and all who are wise admire." Your plagiarisms redound to your highest praise; those of others make them crows and jackdaws in your estimation. If yon act rightly in imitating Origen whom you call second only to the Apostles, why do you sharply attack another for following Didymus, whom nevertheless you point to by name as a Prophet and an apostolic man? For myself I must not complain, since you abuse us all alike. First you do not spare Ambrose, great and highly esteemed as he was; then the man of whom you write that he was second only to the Apostles, and that all the wise admire him, and whom you have praised up to the skies a thousand times over, not as you say in two, but in innumerable places, this man who was before an Apostle, you now turn round and make a heretic. Thirdly, this very Didymus whom you designate the Seer-Prophet, who has the eye of the bride in the Song of Songs, and whom you call according to the meaning of his namehyperlink an Apostolic man, you now on the other hand criminate as a perverse teacher, and separate him off with what you call your censor's rod, into the communion of heretics. I do not know whence you received this rod. I know that Christ once gave the keys to Peter: but what spirit it is who now dispenses these censors' rods, it is for you to say. However, if you condemn all those I have mentioned with the same mouth with which you once praised them, I who in comparison of them am but like a flea, must not complain, I repeat, if now you tear me to pieces, though once you praised me, and in your Chroniclehyperlink equalled me to Florentius and Bonosus for the nobleness, as you said, of my life.
26. There is also an astonishing action of his in relation to Melania, which I must not pass by in silence because of the shame which those who hear it may feel. She was the granddaughter of the Consul Marcellinus; and in these very Chronicleshyperlink he had narrated how she was the first lady of the Roman nobility to visit Jerusalem; how she had left her son, then a little child, behind her at Rome, and how the name of Thecla was given her on account of her signal merit and virtue. But afterwards, when he found that some of his deeds were disapproved by this lady through the stricter discipline of her life, he erased her name from all the copies of his work.
It has been necessary for me to bring together the large number of passages which I have adduced from his works, so as to put to the test the truth of his statement,hyperlink that it is only in two short prefaces that he has made mention of Origen with praise, and that not because of his faith but his talent; that he has praised in him the commentator not the doctrinal teacher. I have actually brought forward ten.
27. But there is danger of expanding my treatise too far and becoming burdensome to the reader; it is sufficient that in the passages I have cited he speaks of Origen as almost an Apostle and a teacher of the churches, and says that it is not because of his novel doctrines as the mad dogs pretend that the senate of Rome is excited against him; that he follows him because be himself and all the wise approve him; and all the other testimonies, adduced from his prefaces which are inserted above. But, however these matters may stand, and whatever your relations may be to these writers whether ancient or modern, and whether you call them Apostles or mere wantons,hyperlink Prophets or perverse teachers, what is that to me? It is for you to do penance for all your changes of opinion, your violent words and the wounds you have inflicted on good men, whether you have vet done so or not. As for myself, what is the meaning of your saying "If they have followed me when I erred, let them follow me also in my amendment?" Get thee behind me! Far be such a thing from me. I never followed you or any other man in your errors, but in the strength of Christ I will follow, not you nor any other man, but the Catholic church. But you, who have written all these things who have followed those whom you knew to be in error, you who, as I have shewn, have written so unworthily of God, go you, I say, and do penance, if at least you have any hope that your crime of blasphemy can be pardoned.
27 a. I ask whether you can produce anything which I have written, by which you may convict me of having fallen into heresy even in my youth,-anything of such a character as the heresies of which, though you will not confess it, you now stand convicted. I said that I had followed or imitated you in your system of translating, in that alone and in nothing else. Yet you say that by this I have done you all the injury which you complain of. I followed you in such things as I saw that you had done in the Homilies on the Gospel according to Luke. Take the passage: "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." When you found that the Greek Commentary had something relating to the Son of God which was not right, you passed it over; whereas the words about the Spirit, which as you may remember, are expressed in the ordinary way, you not only did not pass over but added a few words of your own to make the expression more clear. And so in the note on the words,hyperlink "Behold, when the voice of thy salutation came into my ears, the babe leaped in my womb," you render: "Because this was not the beginning of his substance," and you add of your own the words "and nature," though both these and a thousand other things in your translations of these homilies or those on Isaiah or Jeremiah, but more particularly in those on Ezekiel, you have now withdrawn. But, in certain places where you found things relating to the faith, that is the Trinity, expressed in a strange manner, you left out words at your discretion. This mode of translation we have both of us observed, and if any one finds fault with it, it is you who ought to make answer, since you made use of it before me. But now the practice which you blame is undoubtedly one for which you may yourself incur blame. The practice of translating word for word you formerly pronounced to be both foolish and injurious. In this I followed you. You can hardly mean that I am to repent of this because you have now changed your opinion, and say that you have translated the present work with literal exactness. In previous cases you took out what was unedifying in matters of faith, though you did so in such a way as not to excise them wholly nor in all cases. For instance, in the Homilies on Isaiah, at the Vision of Godhyperlink Origen refers the words to the Son and the Holy Spirit; and so you have translated, adding, however, words of your own which would make the passage have a more acceptable sense. It stands thus: "Who are then these two Seraphim? My Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit:" but you add of your own, "And do not think that there is any difference in the nature of the Trinity, when the functions indicated by the several persons are preserved." The same thing I have done in a great many cases, either cutting out words or bending them into a sounder meaning. For this you bid me do penance. I do not think that you are of this opinion as regards yourself. If then on this ground no penitence is due from either of us, what other things are there of which you invite me to repent?
28. I repeat that there are no writings of mine in which there is any error to be corrected. There are many of yours which, as I have shewn, according to your present opinion, ought to be wholly condemned. You made an exception in favour of the Commentaries on the Ephesians, in which you imagined that you had written more correctly. But even you must have seen, as I have shewn, how like they are all through to Origen's views; and, indeed, how they contain something more extreme than the views of which you demand the condemnation. And, were it not that you had cut yourself off from the power of repentance by saying "Read over my Commentaries on the Ep. to the Ephesians, and you will acknowledge that I have opposed the doctrines of Origen;" possibly you might wish to turn round and do penance for those, and in this case, as in the rest, to condemn yourself. As far as I am concerned, I give you full leave to repent of these also; indeed, the best thing that you can do is to do penance for all that you have said and also for all that you are going to say; for it is certain that all that you have ever written is to be repented of. But if any one blame me for having translated anything at all of Origen's, then I say that I am the last of many who have done the deed, and the blame, if any, should begin with the first. But does any one ever punish a deed the doing of which he had not previously forbidden. We did what was permissible. If there is to be a new law, it holds good only for the future. But it may be said that the works themselves ought to be condemned and their author as well. If that be so, what is to happen to the other author who writes the same things, as I have shewn most fully above? He must receive a similar judgment. I do not ask for this nor press for it, although he acts a hostile part towards me. But I cannot but see that he is heaping up such a judgment for himself by his rash condemnation of others.
29. But I must deal with you once more by quoting your own words. You say of me in that invective of yourshyperlink that I have by my translation shewn that Origen is a heretic while I was a Catholic. The words are: "That is to say, I am a Catholic, but he whom I was translating is a heretic." Yes you say it, I have read it. Well then, if, as you tell us, the result of my whole work is to show that I am a Catholic and Origen a heretic, what more do you want? Is not your whole object gained if Origen is proved a heretic and I a Catholic? If you bear witness that I have said this and have thus given you satisfaction by the whole of my work, what cause of accusation against me remains? What purpose was served by that Invective of yours against me? If I proved Origen to be a heretic and myself a Catholic, was I right or not? If I was, then why do you subject to blame and accusation what was rightly done? But, if it was not right that Origen should be called a heretic, why do you make a charge against me on that head? What need was there for you to translate in a worse sense what I had already translated according to your principles, though in a less elegant style? Especially what need was there for you to play your readers false, and, when they expected one thing, for you to do another? They imagine that you are acting in opposition to those who defend Origen as Catholic; but the person whom you combat and accuse is the man who you say has pronounced him a heretic. Perhaps it was for this that you invited me to do penance; and I had misunderstood you. But even of this I must say that I could not repent, if my repentance implied that I thought all things which are found in his works are catholic. Whether what is uncatholic is his own or, as I think, inserted by others, God only knows: at all events these things, when brought to the standard of the faith and of truth are wholly rejected by me. What then is it that you want me to say? That Origen is a heretic? That is what you say that I have done, and you blame it. That he is a catholic then? Again you make this a ground of accusation against me. Point out more clearly what you mean; possibly there is something which you can find out that lies between the two. This is all the wit that you have gathered from the acuteness of Alexander and Porphyry and Aristotle himself: This is the issue of all the boasting which you make of having from infancy to old age been versed and trained in the schools of rhetoric and philosophy, that you set forth with the intention of pronouncing sentence on Origen as a heretic, and in the very speech in which you are delivering judgment turn upon the man whom you are addressing and accuse him because he also has shown Origen to be a heretic. I beg all men to note that there is in all this no care for the faith or for truth, no earnest thought of religion and sound judgment; there is nothing but the practised lust of evil speaking and accusing the brethren which works in his tongue, nothing but rivalry with his fellow men in his heart, nothing but malice and envy in his mind. So much is this the case that, before any cause of ill feeling existed, and I spoke of you with praise as my brother and colleague, you nevertheless were angry at my advances. Forgive me for not knowing that you were what the Greeks call acatonomastos (akatono/mastoj), one whom no one dares to address by name. Still, I wonder that you should call upon me to condemn what you complain of me for branding as wrong.
30. It seems needless to make any answer to that part of his indictment in which he says that the works of the Martyr Pamphilus, expressed as they are with so much faithfulness and piety, are either not to be considered genuine or if genuine, to be treated with contempt. Is there any one to whose authority he will bow? Is there any one whom he will refrain from abusing? All the old Greek writers of the church, according to him, have erred. As to the Latins, how he disparages them, how he attacks them one by one, both those of the old and those of modern times, any one who reads his various work knows well. Now even the Martyrs fail to gain any respect from him. "I do not believe," he says "that this is really the work of the Martyr." If such an argument were admitted in the case of the works of any writer, how can we prove their genuineness in any particular case? If I were to say, It is not true that books of Miscellanies are Origen's as you maintain, how can they be proved to be his? His answer is, From their likeness to the rest. But, just as, when a man wants to forge some one's signature, he imitates his handwriting, so he who wishes to introduce his own thoughts under another man's name, is sure to imitate the style of him whose name he has assumed. But, to pass over for brevity's sake all that might with great justice be said on this point, if you were determined to be so bold as to question the works of the Martyr, you ought to have brought out publicly the actual statements which seemed to you liable to question, and then every reader could have seen what was absurd in them and what was reasonable, what was unsuitable to or against the system of the Apostles; and especially the great impiety, whatever it may have been, in expiation of which you tell us that the Martyr shed his blood. A man who read those actual words would be able to say, not, as now, on your judgment but on his own, either that the martyr had gone wrong, or that a treatise which was so full of absurdity and unbelief had been composed by some one else. But, as it is, you know well that if the writings which you impugn are read by any one, the blame will be turned back upon him who has unjustly found fault; and therefore you do not cite the passages which you impugn, but with that `censor's rod' of yours, and by your own arrogant authority, you make your decrees in this style: "Let this book be cast out of the libraries, let that book be retained; and again, if today a book is accepted, tomorrow if any one but myself has praised it, let it be cast out, and with it the man who praised it. Let this one be counted as Catholic, even though he seems at times to have gone wrong; let that man have no pardon for his error, even though he has said the same things as myself, and let no man translate him nor read him, for fear he should recognize my plagiarisms. This man indeed was a heretic, but he was my master. And this other, though he is a Jew, and of the Synagogue of Satan, and is hired to sell words for gain, yet he is my master who must be preferred to all others, because it is among the Jews alone that the truth of the Scriptures dwells." If the universal Church had with one voice conferred on you this authority, and had demanded of you that you should be the judge of each and all, would it not have been your duty to refuse to allow so heavy and perilous a burden to be laid upon you? But now we have made such progress in the daily habit of disparaging others that we no longer spare even the martyrs. But let us suppose that the work is not that of the martyr Pamphilus, but of some other unknown member of the church; did he, whoever he may have been, employ his own words, I ask, so that we are called upon to defer to the merits of the writer? No. He sets out quotations from the works of Origen himself, and exhibits his opinion upon each question not in the words of the apologist but in those of the accused himself; and, just as in the present treatise what I have quoted from your writings carried much more force than what I have said myself, so also the defence of Origen lies not in the authority of his apologist, but in his own words. The question of authorship is superfluous, when the defence is so conducted as to dispense with the author's aid.
31. But I must come to that head of his inculpation of me which is most injurious and full of ill-will; nay, not of ill-will only but of malice. He says: Which of all the wise and holy men before us has dared to attempt the translation of these books which you have translated? I myself, he adds, though asked by many, to do it, have always refused. But the fact is, the excuse to be made for those holy men is easy enough; for it by no means follows because a man of Latin race is a holy and a wise man, that he has an adequate knowledge of the Greek language; it is no slur upon his holiness that he is wanting in the knowledge of a foreign tongue. And further, if he has the knowledge of the Greek language, it does not follow that he has the wish to make translations. Even if he has such a wish, we are not to find fault with him for not translating more than a few works, and for translating some rather than others. Every man has power to do as he likes in such matters according to his own free will or according to the wish of any one who asks him to make the translation. But he brings forward the case of the saintly men Hilary and Victorinus, the first of whom, though well-known as a commentator, translated nothing, I believe, from the Greek; while the other himself tells us that he employed a learned presbyter named Heliodorus to draw what he needed from the Greek sources, while he himself merely gave them their Latin form because he knew little or nothing of Greek. There is therefore a very good reason why these men should not have made this translation. That you should have acted in the same way is, I admit, a matter for wonder. For what further audacity, what larger amount of rashness, would have been required to translate those books of Origen, after you had put almost the whole of their contents into your other works, and, indeed, had already published in books bearing your own name all that is said in those which you now declare worthy of blame?
32. Perhaps it was a greater piece of audacity to alter the books of the divine Scriptures which had been delivered to the Churches of Christ by the Apostles to be a complete record of their faith by making a new translation under the influence of the Jews. Which of these two things appears to you to be the less legitimate? As to the sayings of Origen, if we agree with them, we agree with them as the sayings of a man; if we disagree, we can easily disregard them as those of a mere man. But how are we to regard those translations of yours which you are now sending about everywhere, through our churches and monasteries, through all our cities and walled towns? are they to be treated as human or divine? And what are we to do when we are told that the books which bear the names of the Hebrew Prophets and lawgivers are to be had from you in a truer form than that which was approved by the Apostles? How, I ask, is this mistake to be set right, or rather, how is this crime to be expiated? We hold it a thing worthy of condemnation that a man should have put forth some strange opinions in the interpretation of the law of God; but to pervert the law itself and make it different from that which the Apostles handed down to us,-how many times over must this be pronounced worthy of condemnation? To the daring temerity of this act we may much more justly apply your words: "Which of all the wise and holy men who have gone before you has dared to put his hand to that work?" Which of them would have presumed thus to profane the book of God, and the sacred words of the Holy Spirit? Who but you would have laid hands upon the divine gift and the inheritance of the Apostles?
33. There has been from the first in the churches of God, and especially in that of Jerusalem, a plentiful supply of men who being born Jews have become Christians; and their perfect acquaintance with both languages and their sufficient knowledge of the law is shewn by their administration of the pontifical office. In all this abundance of learned men, has there been one who has dared to make havoc of the divine record handed down to the Churches by the Apostles and the deposit of the Holy Spirit? For what can we call it but havoc, when some parts of it are transformed, and this is called the correction of an error? For instance, the whole of the history of Susanna, which gave a lesson of chastity to the churches of God, has by him been cut out, thrown aside and dismissed. The hymn of the three children, which is regularly sung on festivals in the Church of God, he has wholly erased from the place where it stood. But why should I enumerate these cases one by one, when their number cannot be estimated? This, however, cannot be passed over. The seventy translators, each in their separate cells, produced a version couched in consonant and identical words, under the inspiration, as we cannot doubt, of the Holy Spirit; and this version must certainly be of more authority with us than a translation made by a single man under the inspiration of Barabbas. But, putting this aside, I beg you to listen, for example, to this as an instance of what we mean. Peter was for twenty-four years Bishop of the Church of Rome. We cannot doubt that, amongst other things necessary for the instruction of the church, he himself delivered to them the treasury of the sacred books, which, no doubt, had even then begun to be read under his presidency and teaching. What are we to say then? Did Peter the Apostle of Christ deceive the church and deliver to them books which were false and contained nothing of truth? Are we to believe that he knew that the Jews possessed what was true, and yet determined that the Christians should have what was false? But perhaps the answer will be made that Peter was illiterate, and that, though he knew that the books of the Jews were truer than those which existed in the church, yet he could not translate them into Latin because of his linguistic incapacity. What then! Was the tongue of fire given by the Holy Spirit from heaven of no avail to him? Did not the Apostles speak in all languages?
34. But let us grant that the Apostle Peter was unable to do what our friend has lately done. Was Paul illiterate? we ask; He who was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, touching the law a Pharisee, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel? Could not he, when he was at Rome, have supplied any deficiencies of Peter? Is it conceivable that they, who prescribed to their disciples that they should give attention to reading,hyperlink did not give them correct and true reading? These men who bid us not attend to Jewish fables and genealogies, which minister questioning rather than edification; and who, again, bid us beware of, and specially watch, those of the circumcision; is it conceivable that they could not foresee through the Spirit that a time would come, after nearly four hundred years, when the church would find out that the Apostles had not delivered to them the truth of the old Testament, and would send an embassy to those whom the apostles spoke of as the circumcision, begging and beseeching them to dole out to them some small portion of the truth which was in their possession: and that the Church would through this embassy confess that she had been for all those four hundred years in error; that she had indeed been called the Apostles from among the Gentiles to be the bride of Christ, but that they had not decked her with a necklace of genuine jewels; that she had fondly thought that they were precious stones, but now had found out that those were not true gems which the Apostles had put upon her, so that she felt ashamed to go forth in public decked in false instead of true jewels, and that she therefore begged that they would send her Barabbas, even him whom she had once rejected to be married to Christ, so that in conjunction with one man chosen from among her own people, he might restore to her the true ornaments with which the Apostles had failed to furnish her.
35. What wonder is there then that he should tear me to pieces, being as I am of no account; or that he should wound Ambrose, or find fault with Hilary, Lactantius and Didymus? I must not greatly grieve over any injury of my own in the fact that he has attempted to do my work of translating over again, when he is only treating me with the same contempt with which he has treated the Seventy translators. But this emendation of the Seventy, what are we to think of it? Is it not evident, how greatly the grounds for the heathens' unbelief have been increased by this proceeding? For they take notice of what is going on amongst us. They know that our law has been amended, or at least changed; and do you suppose they do not say among themselves, "These people are wandering at random, they have no fixed truth among them, for you see how they make amendments and corrections in their laws whenever they please," and indeed it is evident that there must have been previous error where amendment has supervened, and that things which undergo change at the hand of man cannot possibly be divine. This has been the present which you have made us with your excess of wisdom, that we are all judged even by the heathen as lacking in wisdom. I reject the wisdom which Peter and Paul did not teach. I will have nothing to do with a truth which the Apostles have not approved. These are your own words:hyperlink "The ears of simple men among the Latins ought not after four hundred years to be molested by the sound of new doctrines." Now you are yourself saying: "Every one has been under a mistake who thought that Susanna had afforded an example of chastity to both the married and the unmarried. It is not true. And every one who thought that the boy Daniel was filled with the Holy Spirit and convicted the adulterous old men, was under a mistake. That also was not true. And every congregation throughout the universe, whether of those who are in the body or of those who have departed to be with the Lord, even though they were holy martyrs or confessors, all who have sung the Hymn of the three children have been in error, and have sung what is false. Now therefore after four hundred years the truth of the law comes forth for us, it has been bought with money from the Synagogue. When the world has grown old and all things are hastening to their end, let us change the inscriptions upon the tombs of the ancients, so that it may be known by those who had read the story otherwise, that it was not a gourdhyperlink but an ivy plant under whose shade Jonah rested; and that, when our legislator pleases, it will no longer be the shade of ivy but of some other plant.
36. But Origen also, you will tell us, in composing his work called the Hexapla, adopted the asterisks,hyperlink taking them from the translation of Theodotion. How is this? You produce Origen sometimes for condemnation, sometimes for imitation, at your own caprice. But can it be admitted as right that you should bring in the same man as your advocate whom just now you were accusing? Can you take as an authority for your actions one whom you yourself have previously condemned, and to the condemnation of whom you stirred up the Roman senate? You ought to have made provision for this beforehand. No man begins by cutting the trunk of a tree when he is intending to lean against it; and no man first impugns the faith of another and then invokes his faith in his own defence. Whether Origen did as you say or not, makes no difference to you. If you wish that his case should be a precedent for yours, read over your judgment upon him, and see what you have said. You used the expression: "This is not clearing yourself but only seeking abettors of your crime." Apply this to yourself; your business is not to seek abettors of your crime, but to find means of justification for your conduct. However, let us see whether anything of the kind was done by Origen whom you make both plaintiff and defendant. I do not find a single passage which he translated froth the Hebrew. How then can your action and his be said to be alike? What he did was this. He proved that apostates and Jews had translated the writings which the Jews specially read: and, since it would frequently happen in the course of discussion that they falsely asserted that some things had been taken out and others put in in our copies of the Scriptures, Origen desired to shew to our people what reading obtained among the Jews. He therefore wrote out each of their versions in separate pages or columns, and pointed out by means of certain specified marks at the head of each line what had been added or subtracted by them; and he merely put these marks of his in the work of others, not in his own; so that we might understand not what we ourselves but what the Jews believed to have been either removed or inserted. This was no more than what is done in the army when a list is made out containing the names of the soldiers. If the captain wishes to see how many of them have survived after an action, he sends a man to make inquiry; and he makes his own mark, a (q) (theta), for instance, as is commonly done, against the name of each soldier who has fallen, and puts some other mark of his own to designate the survivors. Do you suppose that he who makes one mark against the name of a dead man and another of his own against that of a survivor, will be thought to have done anything which causes the one to be dead and the other to be alive? He has only, as is well understood, marked the names of those who have been killed by others, so as to call attention to the fact. Just in the same way, Origen pointed out by certain marks of his own, namely, the signs of asterisks and obeli,hyperlink which words had been, so to speak, killed by other translators, and those which had been superfluously introduced. But he put in no single word of his own, nor did he make it appear that the certainty of our copies was in any point shaken; but those things which, as the actual words run, seemed wanting in plainness and clearness, he showed to be full of the mysteries of a spiritual meaning. What comfort then can the conduct of Origen give you in this matter, when your work is shown to be quite unlike his, and when all your labour is spent upon making one letter kill the next, whereas his endeavour, on the contrary, is to vindicate the Spirit which giveth life?
37. This action is yours, my brother, yours alone. It is clear that no one in the church has been your companion or confederate in it, but only that Barabbas whom you mention so frequently. What other spirit than that of the Jews would dare to tamper with the records of the church which have been handed down from the Apostles? It is they, my brother, you who were most dear to me before you were taken captive by the Jews, it is they who are hurrying you into this abyss of evil. It is their doing that those books of yours are put forth in which you brand your Christian brethren, not sparing even the martyrs, and heap up accusations speakable and unspeakable against Christians of every degree, and mar our peace, and cause a scandal to the church. It is they who cause you to pass sentence upon yourself and your own writings as upon words which you once spoke as a Christian. We all of us have become worthless in your eyes, while they and their evil acts are all your delight. If you had but listened to Paul where he says in his Epistle:hyperlink "If any brother be overtaken in a fault ye who are spiritual restore such a one in the spirit of meekness," you would never have let your passions swell up so as altogether to break through the order of our spiritual discipline. Suppose that I had written something which was injurious to you; suppose that I had done some injustice to you a man of the highest eloquence, who were my brother and my brother presbyter, whom also I had pronounced worthy of imitation in your method of translation: even so, this was the first complaint which you had received of any injury on my part since friendship had been restored between us, and that with difficulty and much trouble. But suppose that you had reason to be offended at the fact that, in my translation of Origen, I passed over some things which appeared to me unedifying in point of doctrine-though in this I only did what you had done. Possibly I was deserving of blame and correction for this. You say that some of the brethren sent letters to you demanding that the faults of the translator should be pointed out. What then did you do, you who are a man of spiritual attainments? What a model, what an example of conduct in such matters is this which you have given! You not only blazen forth the shame of your brother's nakedness to those who are without, but you yourself tear away the covering of his nakedness. Suppose even that what I did was not done as you had done it, suppose that, through some access of drunkenness creeping unawares upon me, I had laid bare my own shame as the Patriarch did; would it have been a curse which you would have incurred if you had walked backward and made your reply like a soft cloak to cover my reproach, if the letter of the brother who was wide-awake had veiled the brother who lay exposed through his own drowsiness in writing?
38. But you will say, It was impossible for me to reply otherwise than I did. The letter which I received was such that, if I had not replied and retranslated literally the books which you had translated paraphrastically, I should myself have been thought to be a follower of Origen. I will not at present say anything as to the character of that letter, except that it bears the name of a man of high rank, Pammachius: but I ask, would there have been anything uncourteous in such a reply as this: I "My brothers we ought not readily to judge of other men's works. You remember what you did when I had sent my books against Jovinian to Rome,hyperlink and when some persons understood them in a different sense from that in which, if my memory serves me, I had composed them. They were read by a great many people, and almost every one I was offended by them, you yourself, as was believed, amongst them. Did you not on that occasion withdraw from circulation the copies which had been exposed to sale publicly in the forum, and send them, not to some one else, but to me, at the same time pointing out the grounds on which you thought so many had been offended? And I, as you remember, wrote an Apology in new terms, so as to give a sounder meaning, as far as I could, to expressions to which a different sense had been attributed. Well, it is but fair that as we would that men should do to us so we should do to them: and therefore, as you sent me back my books for correction, so do now with these books: send them back to their author, and hint to him what you think blameable in them, so that, if in anything he has gone wrong, he may correct it. Besides, though I have exercised my talents on many subjects, and laboured out many works, this is almost the first work which he has attempted, and possibly even this he has done under compulsion, so that it is not strange if he has not gone quite straight at first. We should not seize upon opportunities for disparaging men who are Christians, but seek their advantage by correcting what they have done wrong."
39. If your reply to him had been couched in terms like these, would you not have ministered grace and edification both to him, since he has been initiated into the fear of God, and to all your other readers, whereas these invectives of yours are the cause of sadness and confusion to all who fear God, since they see you a prey to this hideous lust of detraction, and me driven to the wretched necessity of recrimination. But, as I have said, this evidence was unnecessary. You yourself in the books you published against Jovinian, at one time assert, as can be shewn, the same things which you blamed in him, while at another you fall into the opposite extreme, and declare marriage to be so disgraceful a state that its stain cannot even be washed away by the blood of martyrdom. But, if it appeared to you an easy thing for your friend to procure what amounts to a correction of the dogma of the Manichaeans as it was originally expressed in these books, and that when they were already published and placed in the hands of many persons to copy, what difficulty would there have been in my correcting a work which was not my own but a translation of that of another man, if any mistakes could be pointed out in it, I will not say by reason, but even by envy? especially when it was still in rough sheets, which I had not read over again or corrected, and which were not published when your friends took possession of them. Was it an impossibility to get these writings corrected which were then in an uncorrected state? But the sting does not proceed from that quarter; he would have found nothing to blame there It proceeds wholly from the fact that he was afraid that it might come to light what is the source of all that he says, and whence he gains the reputation of a learned man and a great expounder of the Scriptures.
40. I explained the reasons which induced me to make the translation so that it should be seen that I acted, not in the spirit of contention and rivalry, in which he so often acts, but from the necessity which I have explained above; and I did it as an aid to a good and useful undertaking.hyperlink I hoped that it might impart something both of lucidity and of brightness to one who, though with little culture, was composing a serious work. Do we not know cases in which old houses have been of use in the construction of new ones? Sometimes a stone is taken from the parts of air old house which are remote and concealed, to decorate the portal of the new house and adorn its entrance. And at times an edifice of modern architecture is supported by the strength of a single ancient beam. Are we then to place ourselves in opposition to those who rightly use what is old in building up what is new? Are we to say, You are not allowed to transfer the materials of the old house to the new, unless you join each beam to its beam, each stone to its stone, unless you make a portico of what was a portico before, a chamber of what was a chamber; and this must further involve building up the most secret recesses from what were such before, and the sewers from the former sewers: for every large house must have such places. This is the process of translating word for word, which in former days you esteemed inadmissible, but which you now approve. But you claim that what is in itself unlawful is lawful for you, while for us even what is lawful you impute as a crime. You think it right that you should be praised for changing the words of the Sacred Books and Divine volumes; but if we, when we imitate you in translating a human work, pass over anything which seems to us not to be edifying, we are to have no pardon for this at your hands, though you yourself set us the example.
41. However, let him act in these matters as he himself thinks lawful or expedient. Let me recapitulate in the end of this book what I have said in a scattered way in my own defence. He had said of me that it seemed as if I could not be a heretic without him; I therefore set forth my belief and, in respect of the resurrection of the dead I proved that he rather than I was in error, since he spoke of the resurrection body as frail. I shewed also that he did away with the distinction of sex in the other world, saying that bodies would become souls women men. I next revealed the causes which had led to my translation-very proper causes in my opinion; I shewed that it was not because I was stimulated by contentiousness, nor because I was desirous of glory, but because I was incited by the fear of God, that I imported a store of old Greek material to be used in the new Latin construction, that I furbished up the old armour which had become enveloped in rust, not with a view to excite a civil war but to repel a hostile attack. I then introduced the chief matter on which they have laid their forgers' hands, the adulterous blasphemy against the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, a thing quite alien from me, but brought in by these men in their wickedness as I shewed by quotations.
42. I then took up one by one the points in which he had blamed Origen, with the intention of striking at me and discrediting my work of translation. I shewed from those very Commentaries of his from which he had said that we might expect to learn and test his belief, that on three points, namely the previous state of the soul, the restitution of all things, and his views concerning the devil and apostate angels, he has himself written the same things which he blames in Origen. I convicted him of having said that the souls of men were held bound in this body as in a prison; and I proved that he had asserted in these very Commentaries that the whole rational creation of angels and of human souls formed but a single body. I next shewed that, as to an association for perjury, there was no one who had so much to do with it in its deepest mysteries as himself; and in accordance with this I proved that the doctrine that truth and the higher teaching ought not to be disclosed to all men was taught by him in these same Commentaries. I next took up the question of secular literature, as to which he had made this declaration to Christ as he sat on the judgment seat and ordered him to be beaten: "If ever I read or possess the books of the heathen, I have denied Thee;" and I shewed clearly that he not only reads and possesses these books now, but that he supports all the bragging of which his teaching is full on his knowledge of them; so much so that he boasts of having been introduced to the knowledge of logic through the Introduction of Porphyry the prince of unbelievers. And, while he says that it is a doctrine of the heathen, to speak in this or that manner both about the soul and about other creatures, I shewed that he had spoken of God in a more degrading manner than any of the heathen when he said that God had a mother-in-law. But further, whereas he had declared that he had only mentioned Origen in two short Prefaces, and then not as a man of apostolic rank but merely as a man of talent, I, though for brevity's sake only bringing forward ten of his Prefaces, established the fact that in each of them he had spoken of him not only as an apostolic man but as a teacher of the churches next after the apostles, and as one whose teaching was followed by himself and all wise men.
Footnotes
47 Jer. i, 11, Jer. i, 13.
48 These games took place at Rome each February in honour of Lupercus the god of fertility. Two noble youths, after a sacrifice of goats and dogs, ran almost naked about the city with thongs cut from the skins, a stroke from which was believed to impart fertility to women.
49 Romulus, the founder of Rome who slew his brother Remus.
50 Eun. Prol. The sentiment, not the words, are quoted above.
51 The blind teacher of Alexandria.
52 2 Cor. xi. 6.
53 Ps. cxix, 46.
54 Phil. ii, 3.
55 Rom. ii, 21.
56 Sensuum nomine. Thomas the Apostle is called Didymus. John xi, 16.
57 See the continuation by Jerome of the Chronicle of Eusebius (not included in this translation) a.d. 381 "Florentius, Bonosus and Rufinus became known as distinguished monks."
58 Chronicle. a.d. 377.
59 Letter lxxxiv. 2.
60 Venerarios, belonging to Venus or love. It might mean `beloved ones.
0'
61 Luke i, 44.
62 Is. vi.
63 Namely, Ep. lxxxiv. c. 7.
64 Tim. iv. 13.
65 Jer. Letter lxxxiv. c. 8.
66 This change of the gourd for the ivy forms the ground. work of a curious story told by Augustine, to which no doubt Rufinus here alludes See Ep. civ, 5 of the collection of Jerome's letters. Augustin Letter lxxi.
67 The asterisks denoted that the words to which they were attached were added, and the obeli (_) that something had been subtracted. See Jerome's Preface to the Kings in this Series.
68 Stars and spits.
69 Gal. vi, 1.
70 See Jerome's letter to Pammachius (Letter xlviii) describing his friend's remonstrance, and defending himself.