Apology against Rufinus

I have learned from your letters and those of many others that in the school of Tyrannus, by the tongue of my dogs, it is objected against me by him, out of my enemies, that I translated the books Peri Archon into Latin. What singular impudence! They accuse the physician for having exposed the poisons, so that, of course, they may protect their seller of drugs not by the merit of innocence but by partnership in the crime; as if the number of sinners lessened the guilt, and accusation were about persons and not about things. Books are written against me and are pressed on everyone to hear; and yet they are not published, so that they may both strike the hearts of the simple and take from me the opportunity of answering for myself. A new kind of malice: to accuse with what you fear to have exposed, to write what you hide. If what he writes is true, why did he fear the public? If false, why did he write it? We read long ago as boys: "I think it the mark of an intemperate man to write anything he wishes to be kept hidden." What, I ask, is this pain? Why do they seethe? Why do they rage? Because I rejected a figured herald? Because I did not wish to be praised by a deceitful mouth? Because under the name of a friend I detected an enemy's snares? I am called brother and colleague in his little preface, and my crimes are set out plainly enough: what I wrote, with what praises I raised Origen to the sky. He says he did it in good faith. And how is it that now, as an enemy, he objects the very things which he then praised as a friend? He had wished to follow me in translation as a forerunner, and to borrow authority for his work from my writings. It would have been enough to say once what I had written. What need was there to repeat it again and again, and to press it often, and, as though no one would believe him when he praised, to unroll my very words? Simple and pure praise is not so anxious about the hearers' belief. What did he fear, that without the testimony of my sayings he would not be believed in praising me? Do you see that we understand his prudence, and that we have often played in the schools with the tricks of mocking praise? He cannot plead simplicity in that in which he is caught as a craftsman of malice. To err once, or at most twice, may be chance: why does he err prudently and often, and so weave error through the whole that I may not deny what he praises? It was the part of a prudent man and a friend, after a quarrel had been reconciled, to avoid even slight suspicions, lest what he had done by chance should be thought done on purpose. Hence Tully too, in his notes of the case for Gabinius, says: "While I have always thought that all friendships must be kept with the greatest scruple and faith, so above all those which have been restored to favour from enmity; because when friendships are unbroken, a neglected duty is defended by the excuse of thoughtlessness or (to put it more gravely) negligence; but after a return to favour, if anything is done amiss, it is thought not neglected but violated, and is usually assigned not to thoughtlessness but to treachery." Horace Flaccus too, in the letter he writes to Florus, says: "Favour badly patched comes together in vain, and is torn apart again."

What good does it do me now that he swears he erred in simplicity? See, his praises are objected against me, and the not simple nor pure praise of a most simple friend is made a crime. If he was building up authority for his work, wishing to show whom he was following, he had at hand Hilary the confessor, who translated almost forty thousand lines of Origen on Job and the Psalms. He had Ambrose, almost all of whose books are full of his words; and the martyr Victorinus, who proves his simplicity in this, that he plots against no one. Of all these he is silent, and, as though passing over the pillars of the church, he pursues me alone, a flea and a man of no account, through corners. Unless perhaps with the same simplicity with which he unknowingly accused his friend, he swears that he did not know of them. And who will believe it of a most learned man, who has so great a knowledge of the old writers, especially the Greeks, that while he pursues foreign things he has almost lost his own, that he does not know men of most recent memory, and Latins? From which it is clear that it was not so much that I was praised by him as that they were not accused: so that whether it is praise (as he tries to persuade fools) or accusation (as I feel from the pain of my wound), I should have neither the glory of equals in the praise nor comfort in the blame.

I have your letters, in which you write that I have been accused, and urge me to answer my accuser, lest if I keep silent I seem to admit the charge. I answered them, I confess; and though wounded I so kept the rights of friendship as to defend myself without accusing the accuser; and what one friend at Rome had objected, I said was bandied about by many enemies in the whole world, so that I might seem to answer not a man but charges. It is another matter if, by the right of friendship, I ought to have kept silent when accused, and, with my face muddied and, so to speak, spattered with the stench of heresy, not to wash it even with plain water, lest he should be thought to have done me an injury. This language is neither of a man nor to a man: to attack a friend openly and set out his crimes under the guise of a praiser, and not to leave him even this freedom, to prove himself catholic, and to answer that the praise of a heretic objected against him arose not from assent to heresy but from great admiration. It had pleased him, or, as he wishes it to seem, he was compelled, to turn into Latin what he did not wish to. What need was there to drag me, living in retirement and separated by such great spaces of sea and land, into the question? to set me against the ill-will of very many, so that by praising he would harm me more than he would help himself by the example? Now too, because I refused my praiser, and by turning my pen showed that I am not what my close friend proclaimed, I am said to be raging, and he is said to have woven three books against me with Attic charm, accusing the same things which he had praised before, and objecting against me in the translation of Origen wicked doctrines, of whom in his little preface of praise he had said: "I will follow the rule of my predecessors, and especially of that man whom I mentioned above, who, having translated into Latin more than seventy of Origen's books, which he called homilies, and some also of his tomes written on the Apostle, in which some stumbling blocks are found in the Greek, so polished and cleansed everything in translating that the Latin reader will find nothing in them at variance with our faith. Him, then, we too follow, if not in force of eloquence, yet in the rules of the method, as far as we can."

Certainly these are his words; he cannot deny it. The very elegance of the style and the composed speech, and, what is greater than these, Christian simplicity, prove the character of their author. It is another matter if Eusebius corrupted them, and the accuser of Origen and my partisan testified in one and the same work that both he and I either erred or thought rightly. He cannot now as an enemy call me a heretic whom he declared beforehand not to differ from his own faith. And at the same time I ask him what he means by this measured and doubtful language: "Nothing," he says, "will the Latin reader find in them at variance with our faith." What does he call his faith? That in which the Roman church is strong? Or that which is contained in Origen's volumes? If he answers "the Roman," then we are catholics, who translated nothing of Origen's error. But if Origen's blasphemy is his faith, while he charges me with inconstancy he proves himself a heretic. If my praiser believes rightly, by his own confession he takes me as his partner; if wrongly, he shows that he praised me before because he thought me a sharer in his error. But against those books which chatter in corners and bite me with stealthy accusation, when they are published and come forth from darkness to light, and reach us either by the zeal of the brothers or the rashness of rivals, I will try to answer. For they need not be much feared, whose author fears to publish them, and has decided they are to be read only by the sworn confederates. Then I will either acknowledge the charges, or wash them away, or turn back on the accuser what has been objected; and I will show that my silence hitherto was of modesty, not of a bad conscience.

Meanwhile I wished to be cleared before the silent judgment of the reader, and to refute the gravest charge among friends, lest I seem to have wounded first, I who, though wounded, by no means aimed weapons at my persecutor, but only put my hand to my own wound. I beg the reader, without prejudice of persons, to lay the blame on him who provoked. Not content with having wounded, as if against a tongueless man always to be silent, he has laboured out three books by lamplight and fabricated Antitheses of Marcion from my works. My mind longs to learn both his sudden learning and my unexpected madness. Perhaps in a short time he has learned what he should teach us; and he will display a sudden river of eloquence, which no one thought he had. "So may that Father grant, so may great Jesus; let him begin to join hand to hand." Although he has balanced the spears of his accusation and hurled them against us with all his strength, we trust in the Lord Saviour that his truth will surround us with a shield, and we shall be able to sing with the Psalmist: "The arrows of little children have become their wounds"; and, "If camps stand against me, my heart will not fear; if battle rises against me, in this I will hope." But of this elsewhere. Now let us return to what we began.

His followers object against me and, "weary of their fortunes, they bring out the arms of Ceres," asking why I turned Origen's books Peri Archon, harmful and opposed to the church's faith, into the Latin tongue. To them the answer is brief and concise: your letters, brother Pammachius, and those of your friends compelled me, saying that they had been fraudulently translated by another, and that some things had been interpolated, and either added or changed. And lest I should put little faith in the letters, you sent copies of that translation with the little preface praising me. When I had read them and compared them with the Greek, I at once noticed that what Origen had said impiously about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, which Roman ears could not bear, had been changed for the better by the translator. But the other doctrines, about the fall of the angels, the falling of souls, the jugglery of the resurrection, the world or the intermundia of Epicurus, the restoration of all things to an equal state, and things much worse than these which it would be long to recount, he had either translated as he found them in the Greek, or set down exaggerated and strengthened from the little commentaries of Didymus, who is a most open champion of Origen: so that one who had read what was catholic about the Trinity would not beware of the heretical in other things.

Another, perhaps, who was not his friend, would say: "Either change all that is bad, or publish all that you think excellent. If, for the sake of the simple, you cut off everything harmful, and do not wish to transfer into a foreign tongue what you pretend was added by heretics, give up whatever is harmful. But if you keep the faithfulness of truth in translation, why do you change some things and leave others untouched? And yet there is an open confession in that same prologue that you corrected the bad and left the best. By this you will be held not by the freedom of a translator but by the authority of an author, if anything heretical is proved in what you translated; and you will be convicted of a manifest crime, that you wished to smear the cup of poison with honey, so that the pretended sweetness might hide the worst venom." An enemy would say these things and much harsher, and would drag you into the court of the church not as translator of a bad work but as its supporter. But I, content only to have defended myself, in the books Archon expressed simply what was in the Greek, not that the reader should believe what I was translating, but that he should not believe what you had translated before. My work had a double usefulness, while both the heretical author is exposed and the untrue translator is refuted. And lest anyone should think I agreed with what I had turned, I fortified the necessity of the translation with a preface, and taught what the reader should not believe. The first translation contains praise of the author; the second, censure. The one provokes the reader to believe; this moves him not to believe. There I too am taken up unwilling as a praiser; here I so far do not praise him whom I translate that I am forced to accuse his praiser. The same thing was not done with the same mind; rather, one road had different ends. He took away what was there, saying it was corrupted by heretics; and added what was not there, asserting it was discussed by the same author in other places; which he will not be able to prove unless he shows the very places from which he says he translated. My aim was to change nothing of the truth. For I translated so as to convict what was badly translated. Do you think me a translator? I was a betrayer: I betrayed a heretic in order to deliver the church from heresy. Why I praised Origen in some things before, the book prefixed to this work shows. Now only the reason of my translation is given, which, since it has a will of piety, I ought not to be charged with impiety, exposing as impious what was being handed to the churches as pious.

I had translated seventy books of his into Latin, as my close friend charges, and many of the tomes. There was never a question about my work; Rome was never stirred. What need was there to hand to Latin ears what Greece detests and the world accuses? I, translating so much over so many years, never caused scandal. You, with your first and only work, unknown before, became famous by rashness. The preface itself shows that you also translated the book of the martyr Pamphilus for the defence of Origen. And you strive with all your strength that the church should not reject one whose faith a martyr approves. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, once standard-bearer of the Arian faction, wrote six books, as I said before, for Origen, a very broad and elaborate work; and he proved by many testimonies that Origen was catholic in his sense, that is, in ours, Arian. Of these you translate the first book under the name of the martyr. And do we wonder that you want me, a little man of small price, to be a praiser of Origen, when you have slandered a martyr? And having changed a few testimonies about the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, which you knew would displease the Romans, you left the rest untouched to the end; doing the same in the Apology, as if Pamphilus's, as you did in the translation of Origen's Peri Archon. If this book is Pamphilus's, which of the six books will be Eusebius's first? In the very volume which you pretend is Pamphilus's, mention is made of the following books. In the second too and the rest Eusebius says that he had already said this in the first book, and that he need not repeat it. If the whole work is Pamphilus's, why do you not translate the remaining books? If it is another's, why do you change the name? You are silent; the facts themselves speak: so that men who would have detested the chief of the Arians should believe a martyr.

What shall I say was in your mind, most simple friend? that you could put a martyr's name on a heretic's book, and make the ignorant defenders of Origen under the authority of a witness of Christ? With the learning in which you are strong, and for which you are praised in the West as a famous syngrapheus, so that all of your party name you their coryphaeus, I do not think you were ignorant of Eusebius's syntagma, and that the martyr Pamphilus composed no work at all. For Eusebius himself, the lover and herald and companion of Pamphilus, wrote three most elegant books containing the life of Pamphilus; in which, while he proclaimed his other qualities with wonderful praises and raised his humility to the sky, he added this too in the third book: "Which friend of learning was not a friend of Pamphilus? If he saw any lacking the necessities of life, he generously gave what he could. He also most readily gave the holy Scriptures, not only to read but to keep, and not only to men but also to women whom he saw devoted to reading. Therefore he also prepared many manuscripts, so that when need arose he might give them to those who wished. And he himself wrote nothing of his own at all, except letters which he happened to send to friends, so much had he humbled himself. But he read the treatises of the ancient writers most studiously, and was constantly occupied in meditating on them."

The defender of Origen and praiser of Pamphilus says that Pamphilus wrote nothing at all and composed nothing in his own words. And he says this when Pamphilus had already been crowned with martyrdom, so that you have no refuge in saying that Pamphilus wrote this after Eusebius's books were published. What will you do? By that book which you published under the martyr's name the consciences of very many have been wounded. The authority of bishops on the condemnation of Origen does not prevail with them, since they think he was proclaimed by a martyr. What will the letters of Bishop Theophilus do? What will those of Pope Anastasius, pursuing the heretic in the whole world, do, when your book, published under the name of Pamphilus, fights against their letters, and the testimony of a martyr is opposed to the name of bishops? What you did in the books Peri Archon, do also in this pseudepigraphal volume. Hear a friend's advice: do not regret your art. Either say that it is not yours, or that it was corrupted by the presbyter Eusebius. How can it be proved against you that it was translated by you? Your hand is not held; you are not of such eloquence that no one can imitate you. Or at least, if the matter comes to proof, and the testimonies of many overwhelm the impudence of your brow, sing a palinode in the manner of Stesichorus. It is better that you repent of your deed than that the martyr remain under slander and the deceived in error. And do not blush at changing your opinion: you are not of such authority and fame as to be ashamed of having erred. Imitate me, whom you love so much, without whom you can neither live nor die; and cry out with me what I, praised by you, said in my own defence.

Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, whom I mentioned above, in the sixth book of his Apology for Origen, objects to Methodius, bishop and martyr, the same thing that you charge against me in my praises, and says: "How did Methodius dare to write now against Origen, who said this and this about Origen's doctrines?" This is not the place to speak for the martyr; for not everything is to be discussed in every place. Let it suffice now to have touched on this: that what was objected by an Arian against a most illustrious and most eloquent martyr, you as a friend praise in me and as an offended man accuse. You have occasion from the present passage too, if you wish, to build a slander against me: why do I now disparage Eusebius, whom I praised before elsewhere? The name is another, Eusebius; but the slander is the same as about the name of Origen. I praised Eusebius in the Church History, in the Chronicle, in the description of the Holy Land; and translating these very works into Latin I gave them to the men of my own tongue. Am I therefore an Arian because Eusebius, who composed these books, is an Arian? If you dare to call me a heretic, remember the little preface to Peri Archon, in which you testify that I am of your faith; and at the same time I beg you to listen patiently to your former friend expostulating. You fight with others; you either slander or suffer slander. Those whom you accuse and by whom you are accused are of your own order; rightly or wrongly, you must see. To me even a true accusation against a brother is displeasing; I do not censure others, but say what I myself would not do. Separated by such spaces of land, how did I sin against you? What did I deserve? Is it because I answered that I am not an Origenist? Is my defence your accusation? And you, if you are not and were not an Origenist, I believe your oath; if you were, I receive you as penitent. Why do you grieve if I am what you say you are? Or is it because I dared to translate Origen's Peri Archon after you, and my translation is thought a blow at your work? What could I do? Your praise, that is, my accusation, was sent to me. You had praised me so strongly and at such length that if I had acquiesced in your praises, everyone would have thought me a heretic. See what the end of the letter from Rome to me contains: "Clear away men's suspicions and convict your accuser, lest if you pass it over you seem to consent." Bound in such a strait, about to translate those same books, listen to what I wrote: "My friends have done me this service" (I did not say "my friend," lest I seem to accuse you) "that if I keep silent I am judged guilty, if I answer, an enemy. Both conditions are hard, but of the two I will choose the lighter. A quarrel can be renewed; blasphemy does not merit pardon." Do you notice that this burden was laid on me against my will and resistance, and that the quarrel that would come from such a work was treated by the excuse of necessity? If you had translated the books Peri Archon without my name, you would rightly complain that they were translated afterwards by me in censure of you. But now you unjustly grieve that I answered you in that work in which I was accused by your praise. For what you call praise, all understand as accusation. Let it be settled with you that you accused me, and you will not be indignant that I answered. Suppose you wrote in good faith, and as an innocent man and most faithful friend, from whose mouth a lie never came, wounded me unknowingly: what is that to me, who was struck? Must I not be treated because you wounded me in good faith? I lie pierced through, the wound hisses in my breast, limbs once white are fouled with blood, and you say to me: "Do not put your hand to the wound, lest I seem to have wounded you"? And yet the translation itself convicts Origen more than you. For you corrected what you thought was added by heretics; I exposed what all Greece cries out was written by him. Which of us judged more rightly is neither my judgment nor yours. Let the writings of both feel the reader's censor's rod. That whole letter, in which I make satisfaction for myself, is directed against the heretics and my accusers: what is it to you, who say you are orthodox and my praiser, if I am rather harsh to heretics and bring their tricks into public? Rejoice at my invective, lest if you grieve you seem to be a heretic. When one writes against vices without naming anyone, he who is angry accuses himself. It would have been the part of a prudent man, even if he was pained, to hide his conscience, and disperse the cloud of his heart with the serenity of his brow.

Otherwise, if you think that whatever is said against Origen and his followers is said against you, then do the letters of Pope Theophilus and of Epiphanius and of other bishops, which I recently translated at their command, attack and tear you? Were the writings of the emperors too, which order the Origenists to be driven from Alexandria and Egypt, dictated at my suggestion? Was it my counsel that the pontiff of the city of Rome detests them with wonderful hatred? Did my pen bring it about that the whole world, after your translation, blazed into hatred of Origen, whom before it read in simplicity? If I have so much power, I wonder that you do not fear me. I, so moderate in the public letter, who took care that you should not think anything was said against you, wrote to you at once a short letter, expostulating about your praises. My friends did not wish to send it to you, because you were not at Rome, and because they said that you with your companions were boasting things about my way of life unworthy of the Christian name. I have appended a copy of it to this volume, so that you may know with how much moderation of friendship I tempered so great a pain.

I hear besides that you carp philosophically at certain things in my letter, and that you, a man of wrinkled brow and knitted eyebrow, play upon me with Plautine wit, because I said that Barabbas the Jew was my teacher. Nor is it surprising if for Bar-Anina, where there is some likeness of the words, you wrote Barabbas, since you have such licence in changing names that you made Pamphilus of Eusebius, a martyr of a heretic. The man must be guarded against, and especially avoided by me, lest suddenly, without my knowing, you name me Sardanapalus instead of Jerome. Hear then, pillar of wisdom and pattern of Catonian severity. I did not call him my master; but I wished to show my zeal for the holy Scriptures, to show that I read Origen just as I had listened to him. For I did not need to learn Hebrew from you. Or was an injury done to you because I followed Apollinaris and Didymus instead of you? Could I not have named in that letter Gregory, a most eloquent man? Who among the Latins is his equal? In him as my teacher I glory and exult. But I set down only those who were under censure, so as to testify that I likewise read Origen not for the truth of his faith but for the merit of his learning. Origen himself, and Clement, and Eusebius, and very many others, when they discuss anything about the Scriptures and wish to prove what they say, are accustomed to write: "A Hebrew told me," and "I heard from a Hebrew," and "This is the opinion of the Hebrews." Certainly Origen too names the patriarch Huillus, who lived in his time; and he concludes the thirtieth tome on Isaiah, at the end of which he expounds "Woe to you, city of Ariel, which David besieged," with Huillus's exposition; and though he says that he had thought otherwise before, he confesses that he was taught by him what is truer. The eighty-ninth Psalm too, which is entitled "A prayer of Moses the man of God," and the eleven others which have no titles, he thinks according to Huillus's exposition to be of the same Moses; nor does he disdain, in interpreting the Hebrew Scripture, to insert in each place what the Hebrews think.

When the letters of Pope Theophilus were recently read, in which he sets out Origen's errors, he is said to have stopped his ears and condemned the author of so great an evil with a clear voice before all, and to have said that until that time he had not known that he had written such wicked things. I do not refuse, nor do I say what another perhaps would say, that he could not be ignorant of what he translated, whose Apology, written by a heretic, he published under a martyr's name, and whose defence he even professed in a volume of his own; against which I will argue in what follows, if there is time for dictating. I say this, which he cannot contradict. If he may have not understood what he translated, why may I not have been ignorant of the books Peri Archon, which I had not read before, and have read only those homilies which I translated, in which, by his own testimony, there is nothing evil? But if, against his own judgment, he now censures me in the things for which he had praised me before, he will be held tight on every side. For either he praised me, a heretic, because he was of the same doctrine as I; or now as an enemy he vainly accuses one whom he formerly proclaimed orthodox. But perhaps then, as a friend, he kept silent about my errors, and now, angry, brings out what he had concealed.

Although inconstancy does not deserve belief, and professed enmities carry suspicion of falsehood, yet I will boldly join battle, wishing to know what heresy I wrote: so that I may either do penance with him, and swear that I was ignorant of Origen's evils and have only now learned his impieties from Pope Theophilus; or at any rate show that I thought rightly, but that he, as is his custom, does not understand. For it cannot be that in those same books on Ephesians, which, as I hear, he accuses, I spoke both well and badly, and that sweet and bitter came out of the same spring; that I, who in the whole work condemned those who believe that souls were made from angels, suddenly forgetting myself should defend what I had condemned before. He cannot charge me with folly, whom he proclaimed in his works most fluent and most eloquent. Otherwise foolish verbosity is to be thought the mark of a pettifogger and a chatterer rather than of an eloquent man. What exactly he accuses in the books I do not know. For the report of his charges, not his writings, has reached me; and it is foolish, according to the Apostle, to beat the air with fists. Yet I will answer at a venture until I come to certainties. I will teach my rival in my old age what I learned as a boy: that there are many kinds of speech, and that according to the nature of the matter not only the thoughts but even the words of the Scriptures vary.

Chrysippus and Antipater move among thorns. Demosthenes and Aeschines thunder against each other. Lysias and Isocrates flow sweetly. Wonderful is the diversity in each, but all are perfect in their own kind. Read Tully's books to Herennius, read his Rhetorics; or, since he says those slipped from his hands unfinished and crude, turn over the three volumes On the Orator, in which he brings in the most eloquent orators of that time, Crassus and Antonius, disputing; and the fourth, the Orator, which he wrote when already old to Brutus: then you will understand that history is composed one way, speeches another, dialogues another, letters another, commentaries another. For in the commentaries on Ephesians I so followed Origen and Didymus and Apollinaris (who certainly hold doctrines contrary to one another) as not to lose the truth of my faith. What is the task of commentaries? They explain the sayings of another, make plain in simple language what was written obscurely; they repeat the views of many, and say: "Some explain this passage thus, others interpret it so; those try to support their sense and understanding by these testimonies and this reasoning"; so that the prudent reader, when he has read different explanations and learned what of many is to be approved or disapproved, may judge what is truer, and, like a good money-changer, reject the coin of counterfeit money. Shall one who in one work that he expounds has set down the explanations of many be held guilty of differing interpretation and of meanings contrary to one another? I suppose you read as a boy the commentaries of Asper on Virgil and Sallust, of Vulcatius on Cicero's speeches, of Victorinus on his dialogues and on Terence's comedies, of my teacher Donatus likewise on Virgil, and of others on others: Plautus, namely, Lucretius, Flaccus, Persius and Lucan. Accuse their interpreters, why they did not follow one explanation, and list in the same matter what seems right either to themselves or to others.

I pass over the Greeks, whose knowledge you boast, and while you pursue foreign things you have almost forgotten your own tongue: lest, by the old proverb, I seem to be "the sow teaching Minerva," and carrying wood into the forest. This I wonder at: that the Aristarchus of our time does not know these childish things. Although you, busy with meanings and bent on building slander against me, despise the precepts of grammarians and orators, and think little of restoring hyperbata after their windings, avoiding harshness of consonants, and shunning gaping speech. It is ridiculous to point out a few wounds in a body weakened and broken all over. I do not choose what to censure; let him choose what is free of fault. He ought not even to have known that Socratic saying: "I know what I do not know."

They are indignant that I wrote that the Origenists are bound together among themselves by orgies of lies. I named the book in which I read this: the sixth book of Origen's Stromata, in which, comparing our doctrine with Plato's view, he speaks thus: "Plato in the third book of the Republic: 'Truth too is to be pursued above all. For if, as we said a little before most rightly, a lie is unbecoming and useless to God, but sometimes useful to men (so that they may use it as a seasoning and a medicine), no one doubts that such licence must be given to physicians and withheld from the unskilled.' 'You say what is true,' he says; 'then the rulers of cities, if it is granted to any others, must sometimes lie, either against enemies or for their country and citizens. But from others, who do not know how to use a lie, every lie must be taken away.'" Origen: "And we, therefore, mindful of that precept, 'Speak truth each one with his neighbour,' ought not to say, 'Who is my neighbour?' but consider how cautiously the philosopher said that a lie is unbecoming and useless to God, but sometimes useful to men; and that God is not to be thought to lie at any time even for the sake of economy. But if the good of the hearer requires it, he speaks in ambiguous words and through riddles brings out what he wishes, so that both the dignity of truth is preserved with him, and what could have been harmful if brought out naked to the crowd is brought out covered with a kind of veil. But the man on whom the necessity of lying lies should take careful heed to use a lie sometimes as a seasoning and a medicine; that he keep its measure, and not exceed the bounds which Judith used against Holofernes, and overcame him by prudent pretence of words. Let him imitate Esther, who corrected the sentence of Artaxerxes by long keeping silent the truth about her race; and above all the patriarch Jacob, who, we read, obtained his father's blessings by a cunning lie. From which it is clear that unless we lie in such a way that some great good is sought for us by it, we must be judged as enemies of him who said, 'I am the truth.'" Origen wrote this; we cannot deny it: he wrote it in books which he spoke to the perfect and to disciples; and he teaches that teachers may lie, but disciples must not lie. He, then, who lies well, and without any shame invents against the brothers whatever comes into his mouth, proves himself an excellent teacher.

He is said also to carp at this: that in interpreting the second Psalm, where we read in Latin "Lay hold of instruction," and in the Hebrew volume it is written nescu bar, I said in my little commentaries "Worship the Son"; and again, turning the whole Psalter into the Roman tongue, as if forgetting my former exposition, I put "Worship purely," which certainly is plain to all as self-contradictory. And truly he must be pardoned if he does not know the truth of the Hebrew tongue, who sometimes falters even in Latin. Nescu, to translate word for word, means kataphilēsate, that is, "kiss"; and I, not wishing to translate it clumsily, followed the sense rather, so as to say "worship." For since those who worship usually kiss the hand and bow the head (which blessed Job denies that he did to the elements and idols, saying: "If I saw the sun when it shone, and the moon walking brightly, and my heart rejoiced in secret, and I kissed my hand with my mouth, which is the greatest iniquity and a denial against God most high"), and the Hebrews, according to the idiom of their language, put kissing for veneration, I translated what they themselves understand, whose word it is. But bar among them signifies different things. For it means "son," as in Bar-Jona, "son of a dove," and Bartholomew, "son of Tholomaeus," and Bartimaeus, and Bar-Jesus, and Barabbas. It also means wheat, and a sheaf of ears, and chosen, and pure. What sin did I commit, then, if I turned an ambiguous word by different interpretations? and if, in the little commentaries, where there is freedom to discuss, I said "Worship the Son," while in the body of the text itself, lest I seem a violent translator and give room to Jewish slander, I said "Worship purely," or "choicely," as Aquila too and Symmachus translated? What harm, then, is done to the church's faith if the reader is taught in how many ways one verse is explained among the Hebrews?

Your Origen may discuss metempsychosis, bring in countless worlds, clothe rational creatures with one body after another, and say that Christ has often suffered and will suffer more often, so that what once profited, once assumed, may always profit; you too assume such authority for yourself that you lie, making a martyr of a heretic and heretics' corruptions of Origen's books: shall I not be permitted to discuss words, and in a work of commentaries teach the Latins what I learned from the Hebrews? If it were not both lengthy and smacking of vainglory, I would show you now what profit there is in wearing out the thresholds of teachers and learning an art from craftsmen; and you would see how great a forest of ambiguous names and words there is among the Hebrews. This has provided material for different interpretation, while each one, among doubtful things, translates what seems to him more consistent. Why do I send you to foreign things? Turn over Aristotle, and Alexander expounding Aristotle's volumes, and you will learn from reading them how great an abundance of ambiguities there is: so that at last you may stop censuring your friend in what you never learned even in a dream.

But since my brother Paulinian reported certain things in the commentaries on Ephesians censured by him, and committed a few of them to memory, and showed me the very places, I must not evade; and I ask the reader, if I am a little longer in setting out and refuting the charges, to pardon the necessity. For I accuse no one else; I strive to defend myself and to refute the slander of heresy thrown at me. On Paul's Letter to the Ephesians Origen wrote three volumes. Didymus too and Apollinaris composed works of their own. Translating or imitating these, what I wrote in the prologue of that work I will append: "This too I mention in the preface, so that you may know that Origen wrote three volumes on this letter, whom we too have followed in part; that Apollinaris and Didymus also published some short commentaries, from which we have gathered some things, though few; and we have added or taken away some things that seemed good to us, so that the studious reader may know at the very beginning that this work is either another's or ours." Whatever fault, then, can be shown in the explanation of this letter, if I cannot show it in the Greek volumes from which I said I translated into Latin, I will acknowledge the charge, and what was not another's will be mine. Yet, lest I seem again to quibble and, by this trick of excuse, not to dare to join battle, I will set down the very testimonies that are charged as crimes.

In the very first book, the testimony of Paul in which he says, "As he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him," we interpreted so as not to say, with Origen, that the election is of those who had existed before, but to refer it to the foreknowledge of God. In short, we said: "That he testified that we were chosen to be holy and blameless before him, that is, God, before the making of the world, belongs to the foreknowledge of God, to whom all things to come are already done, and all things are known before they happen; as Paul himself is predestined in his mother's womb, and Jeremiah is sanctified in the womb, chosen, strengthened, and sent, as a type of Christ, as a prophet to the nations." Certainly there is no crime in this exposition; and while Origen says the contrary, we followed the church's sense. And because it is the duty of a commentator to set down the opinions of many, and I had promised in the preface that I would do this, I also set down Origen's explanation, without odium to his name, saying: "But another, who tries to show that God is just, in that he chooses each one not by the prejudgment of his knowledge but by the merit of the elect, says that before the visible creatures, heaven, earth, the seas and all that is in them, there were other invisible creatures, among them also souls, which for certain causes known to God alone were cast down into this vale of tears, into the place of our affliction and pilgrimage, set in which the saint prayed that he might return to his former seat, saying: 'Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged; I have dwelt with those who dwell in Kedar; my soul has long been a pilgrim.' And the Apostle: 'Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?' And: 'It is better to return and be with Christ.' And elsewhere: 'Before I was humbled, I sinned'; and other things like these which it would be long to write." Notice what I said: "But another, who tries to show that God is just": tries to show, I say, not shows. But if you are scandalized because I compressed Origen's very broad discussion into brief words and opened his sense to the reader, and on that account I seem to you his secret follower because I omitted nothing he said, see whether I did not do it to avoid your slander, so that you might not say that I had kept silent about what he said forcefully, and that he argues more strongly in Greek. I set down, then, though more briefly, everything I found in the Greek, so that his disciples would have nothing new to press on Latin ears. For we despise the known more easily than the sudden. But having set out his interpretation, listen to what we said at the end of the chapter: "For the Apostle does not say, 'He chose us before the foundation of the world when we were holy and blameless,' but 'he chose us that we should be holy and blameless,' that is, we who were not holy and blameless before, that we might be so afterwards. This can be said also of sinners converted to better things; and that sentence will stand: 'No one living will be justified in your sight,' that is, in his whole life, in all the time he has spent in this world. This, understood so, also tells against him who says that souls were chosen before the world was made because of their holiness and having no fault of sins." For (as we said before) Paul and those like him are not chosen because they were holy and blameless; but they are chosen and predestined so that in their subsequent life, through works and virtues, they may become holy and blameless. And does anyone dare, after such a judgment, to accuse us of Origen's heresy? It is about eighteen years since I dictated those books, at the time when Origen's name flourished in the world, when his work Peri Archon was unknown to Latin ears; and yet I professed my faith and showed what displeased me. So even if an enemy could have shown anything heretical in the rest, I would be held guilty not so much of perverse doctrines, which I have often condemned here and in other books, as of an unwary error.

The second passage which my brother showed me was censured by him, because it is very frivolous and plainly displays its slander, I will set down briefly. On that testimony where Paul says, "Making him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, above every principality and power and virtue and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come," after a manifold exposition, when I had come to the offices of God's ministers and was speaking of principalities and powers and virtues and dominions, I added this too: "They must have subjects, who fear them and serve them, and who are strengthened by their might. These distributions of offices will exist not only in the present but also in the age to come, so that by particular advances and honours, ascents and descents, one may grow or decrease, and come under one or another power, virtue, principality and dominion." And after the example of an earthly king and a whole description of the palace, by which I showed the different offices of God's ministries, I added: "And do we think that God, the Lord of lords and King of kings, is content with a single kind of ministry?" Just as one is not called an archangel unless he is first among the angels, so principalities and powers and dominions are not so called unless they have some subjects of lower rank. But if he thinks I follow Origen because I set down advances and honours, ascents and descents, increases and diminutions in my exposition, let him know that it is very different to say that angels and seraphim and cherubim become demons and men, which Origen affirms, and that the angels among themselves have been allotted different kinds of offices, which is not contrary to the church. As among men too the order of dignities differs according to the variety of labour, since bishop and presbyter and every ecclesiastical grade have their own order, and yet all are men: so also among the angels merits are different, and yet all remain in the angelic dignity; men do not come from angels, nor again are men re-formed into angels.

The third passage censured is that, where the Apostle says, "That he might show in the ages to come the abundant riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus," we set down a threefold exposition: in the first what seemed right to us; in the second what Origen would object; in the third what Apollinaris explained simply. If I did not give their names, pardon my modesty: I ought not to carp at those whom I imitated in part and whose views I was translating into the Latin tongue. "But," I said, "the careful reader will at once ask and say"; and again at the end: "But another transfers this, 'That he might show in the ages to come the abundant riches of his grace,' to that understanding." "See," you will say, "under the person of a careful reader you set out Origen's views." I confess the error: I ought not to have said "careful," but "blasphemous"; and if I had done so, and had known by some prophecy that you would follow such trifles, I would have avoided even the words of slander. A great crime, if I called Origen a careful reader, whose seventy books I translated, whom I raised to the sky with praises; for whom I was compelled two years ago to answer your proclamations against me in a short little book! You object, among your praises, that Origen was called by me a teacher of the churches; and you think I should be terrified if, as an enemy, you accuse me of having called him a careful reader. We are accustomed to call very thrifty merchants, frugal slaves, troublesome tutors, and very clever thieves "careful." And in the Gospel the steward of iniquity is said to have done certain things prudently; and, "The sons of this age are more prudent than the sons of light in their generation"; and, "The serpent was wiser than all the beasts which the Lord had made upon the earth."

The fourth passage censured occupies the opening of the second book, in which we expounded this testimony of Paul: "For this reason I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles"; and because the passage is clear in itself, I will set down only the part of the explanation that is open to slander: "That Paul is the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the Gentiles can be understood also of martyrdom, because, cast into chains at Rome, he sent this letter at the time when, as we have shown elsewhere, those to Philemon, the Colossians and the Philippians were written. Or else, since in very many places it is read that this body is called the chain of the soul, in which it is held as though shut up in a prison, we say that Paul is therefore restrained by the bonds of the body and does not return and be with Christ, so that the preaching to the Gentiles through him may be fully completed; although some bring in another sense in this place, that Paul, predestined and sanctified from his mother's womb for preaching to the Gentiles before he was born, afterwards received the chains of the flesh." And in this, as above, I set down a threefold exposition: in the first what seemed right to me; in the second what Origen asserted; in the third what Apollinaris thought, going against his doctrines. Read the Greek commentaries; and unless you find it so, I will confess the crime. What is my sin in this place? That, no doubt, for which I answered above: why I did not name those by whom the things were said. It was superfluous to set down at each testimony of the Apostle the names of those whose works I had marked in the preface that I would translate. And yet that the soul is said to be bound by the body until it returns to Christ, and in the glory of the resurrection exchanges the corruptible and mortal body for incorruption and immortality, is not an absurd understanding. Hence the Apostle too says: "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?", calling it the body of death because it is subject to vices and diseases and passions and to death, until it rises with Christ in glory, and the clay, fragile before, is baked by the heat of the Holy Spirit into the most solid earthenware, changing its glory, not its nature.

The fifth passage is the strongest, in which, expounding that testimony of the Apostle, "From whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint of supply, according to the working in the measure of each member, makes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love," we compressed Origen's very broad exposition, which turns the same thoughts over in different words, into brief speech, taking nothing away from his examples and assertions. And when we had come to the end, we added this: "So also in the restoration of all things, when Christ Jesus the true physician comes to heal the body of the whole church, now scattered and torn, each one according to the measure of faith and recognition of the Son of God (whom he is said to recognize for this reason, that he knew him before and afterwards ceased to know him) will receive his place and begin to be what he had been; yet not so that, according to another heresy, all are set in one age, that is, all re-formed into angels; but each member will be perfect according to its own measure and office. For example, the fugitive angel will begin to be what he was created, man who had been cast out of paradise will be restored again to the tilling of paradise," and so on.

I wonder that you, a most prudent man, did not understand the art of my exposition. "For when I say, 'yet not so that, according to another heresy, all are set in one age, that is, all re-formed into angels,' I show both that the things I am discussing are heretical and that they differ from another heresy." What, then, are the two heresies? One, which says that all rational creatures are re-formed into angels. The other, which asserts that each thing in the restoration of the world will be what it was created. For example: since demons come from angels, demons become angels again; and the souls of men, as they were created, are re-formed not into angels but into what they were created by God, so that both the righteous and sinners become equal. Finally, so that you may know that I did not set out my own view but compared heresies with one another, both of which I had read in Greek, I closed my discussion with this ending: "Therefore, as we said above, these things are rather obscure with us because they are said metaphorically in Greek; and every metaphor, if it is transferred word for word from one language into another, has the sense and shoots of its speech choked as if by thorns." Unless you find these same things in Greek, consider whatever was said to be mine.

The sixth and last thing he is said to object against me (if indeed my brother has forgotten nothing in between) is why, in interpreting that passage of the Apostle where he says, "He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ also the church," after the simple exposition I set down Origen's question, in whose person, his name unspoken, I said: "It can be objected against us that the Apostle's saying, 'No one ever hates his own flesh,' is not true, since those suffering from jaundice, consumption, cancer and catarrhs prefer death to life and hate their own bodies"; and immediately I added what I myself thought: "Let the saying, therefore, rather be referred to a figurative understanding." When I say "figurative," I show that what is said is not true literally, but figured in the cloud of allegory. Yet let us set down the very words contained in Origen's third book: "Let us say that the soul loves that flesh which is to see the salvation of God, and nourishes and cherishes it, instructing it with disciplines, fattening it with heavenly bread, and watering it with the blood of Christ, so that, refreshed and sleek, it may follow its husband with free course and not be weighed down by any burden of weakness. Beautifully too, after the likeness of Christ nourishing and cherishing the church, and saying to Jerusalem, 'How often I wished to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not,' souls also cherish their bodies, so that this corruptible may put on incorruption, and, held up by the lightness of wings, be lifted more easily into the air. Let us therefore cherish, husbands our wives, and our souls our bodies, so that both wives may be turned into men and bodies reduced to souls, and there may be no difference of sex at all; but as among the angels there is neither male nor female, so we too, who are to be like the angels, may begin even now to be what is promised us in heaven."

Above, we expressed the simple exposition which seemed to us right in that testimony, saying: "As far as the simple understanding goes, holy love between husband and wife being commanded, we are now bidden to nourish and cherish our wives, that is, to provide them with food and clothing and what is necessary." This is our view. Everything, then, that follows, "and it can be objected against us," we showed must be understood as coming not from our person but from that of the objectors. Though this is a brief and complete answer, and, as we said above, distorted also by the shadows of allegory from what is to what was not, yet I will come closer and ask what displeases you in this discussion. No doubt that I said that souls, like husbands, cherish their bodies as wives, so that this corruptible may put on incorruption, and, held up by the lightness of wings, be lifted more easily into the air. When I say, "that this corruptible may put on incorruption," I do not change the nature of bodies but increase their glory. So too what follows, "held up by the lightness of wings, be lifted more easily into the air": he who takes on wings, that is, immortality, so as to fly more lightly to heaven, does not lose being what he was. "But," you will say, "what follows moves me: 'Let us therefore cherish, husbands our wives, and our souls our bodies, so that both wives may be turned into men and bodies reduced to souls, and there may be no difference of sex at all; but as among the angels there is neither male nor female, so we too, who are to be like the angels, may begin even now to be on earth what is promised us in heaven.'" They would rightly move you, had I not said after the former words, "may begin even now to be what is promised us in heaven." When I say, "may we begin here on earth to be," I do not take away the nature of the sexes, but I take away lust and the intercourse of husband and wife, as the Apostle says: "The time is short: it remains that those who have wives be as though they had none." And the Lord, asked in the Gospel whose wife of the seven brothers she should be in the resurrection, said: "You err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God: for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but will be like the angels of God in heaven." And indeed, where there is chastity between man and woman, there begins to be neither man nor woman, but, while still in the body, they are changed into angels, among whom there is neither male nor female. Which is also said in another place by the same Apostle: "As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus."

But since my speech has sailed out of rough and rugged places, and we have repelled the charge of heresy thrown at us with all freedom of brow, let us pass to the other parts of his accusation, with which he tries to bite us. Of these the first is that I am a slanderous man, a detractor of all, always sinking my molar into my predecessors. Let him give one whose name I have marked in my works, or whom, according to his art, I have grazed with figured praise. But if I speak against the envious, and the point of my pen wounds Luscius Lavinius or Asinius Pollio of the family of the Cornelii, if I remove from me a man of a stagey and envious mind, and direct all my darts at one stump, why does he share out his wounds among many? Why, by his impatience to answer, does he show that he is the one aimed at? He charges me with perjury, mixed with sacrilege, because in the book in which I speak to instruct a virgin of Christ, I promised, sleeping before the judge's tribunal, that I would never again give attention to secular letters, and yet I sometimes mention the condemned learning. No doubt this is that Sallustian Calpurnius who, through Magnus the orator, raised no great question against us, which we satisfied in a short book. Now, as to the matter in hand, I must answer for the sacrilege and perjury of a dream. I said that I would not read secular letters thereafter: the promise is about the future, not an abolition of past memory. "And how," you will say, "do you retain what you have not reread for so long?" Again, if I answer something from the old books and say, "so much does habit in tender years count," while I deny it I incur the charge, and in bringing a testimony on my behalf I am accused by the very thing by which I am defended. No doubt I must now weave in a long speech what each one's consciousness proves. Which of us does not remember his childhood? I certainly, unless I make a most severe man like you laugh and you imitate for once Crassus, who, Lucilius says, laughed once in his life, remember that as a boy I ran about through the slaves' rooms, spent holidays in games, and was dragged captive from my grandmother's lap to a raging Orbilius. And, to astonish you more, now with grey and bald head I often seem to myself in dreams to have curly hair, and, putting on the toga, to declaim a little controversy before the rhetor. And when I wake up, I congratulate myself on being freed from the danger of speaking. Believe me, childhood remembers many things clearly. If you had learned letters, the jar of your little mind would smell of what it was once steeped in. No waters wash out the purple of wool. Even asses and dumb animals, though on a long journey, know their inns a second time. Do you wonder that I have not forgotten Latin letters, when you learned Greek without a teacher? The elements of dialectic taught me the seven modes of conclusions; what axiōma means, which we can call "proposition"; how no sentence is made without verb and noun; the steps of the sorites, the subtleties of the liar, the frauds of sophisms. I can swear that after I left school I never read these things at all. I must, then, drink from the stream of Lethe, according to the poets' fables, lest I be accused of knowing what I learned. Come, you who charge me with little knowledge and seem to yourself a man of letters and a Rabbi, answer: why have you dared to write anything, and to translate Gregory, a most eloquent man, with equal splendour of speech? Whence have you such abundance of words, such light of thoughts, such variety of metaphors, a man who in youth barely tasted oratory with the tip of your lips? Either I am deceived, or you secretly read Cicero; and that is why you are so eloquent, and charge me with the crime of reading him, so that you alone among church writers may glory in a river of eloquence. Although you seem rather to follow the philosophers, the thorns of Cleanthes and the twistings of Chrysippus, not from an art which you do not know, but from greatness of genius. And since the Stoics claim logic for themselves, and you despise the ravings of this science, in this respect you are an Epicurean: you do not ask how, but what you say. For what is it to you if another does not understand what you mean, since you speak not to all but to your own? In short, I too, reading your writings, though sometimes I do not understand what you say and think I am reading Heraclitus, yet am not pained, nor do I regret my slowness: for I suffer in reading what you suffer in writing.

I would say this if I had promised anything while awake. But now, a new kind of impudence, he objects my dream against me. Would that the crowds of this place, and the gathering of saints from the whole world, allowed me to read the divine Scriptures! So far am I from having time to study outside things. But let him who accuses a dream hear the voices of the prophets, that dreams are not to be believed, because neither does an adultery in a dream lead me to Tartarus, nor does a crown of martyrdom lift me to heaven. How often have I seen myself dead and laid in the tomb! How often flying over the earth, and crossing mountains and seas by swimming through the air! Let him then compel me not to live, or to have wings on my sides, because the mind is often deceived by wandering images. How many are rich in dreams who, opening their eyes, are suddenly beggars! The thirsty drink rivers, and, waking, burn with dry throats. You demand of me the promise of a dream: I will call you to account more truly and strictly. Have you done all that you promised in baptism? Have either of us fulfilled whatever the name of monk demands? Beware, I pray, lest through your beam you see my speck. I speak unwillingly, and pain drives my reluctant tongue into words. It is not enough for you, what you invent about me awake, unless you accuse even my dreams. You are so curious about my doings that you examine what I did or said asleep. I pass over the things by which, speaking against me, you have disfigured your profession; what you have done in word and deed to the disgrace of all Christians. This one thing I declare, and will warn again and again: you attack a horned beast; and if I did not beware of that saying of the Apostle, "Revilers will not possess the kingdom of God," and, "Biting one another, you are consumed by one another," you would feel now that from a small and deceitful concord a great discord has arisen in the world. What good does it do you to heap curses on us among acquaintances and strangers alike? Is it because we are not Origenists, and do not know that we sinned in heaven, that we are accused as sinners on earth? And did we return to concord for this, that I might not speak against heretics, lest, if I describe them, you think yourself attacked? So long as I did not refuse your praise, you followed me as a master, called me brother and colleague, and confessed me catholic in everything. After I did not acknowledge your praises, and judged myself unworthy of the proclamation of so great a man, at once you reverse your pen and blame everything you praised before, bringing forth from the same mouth both sweet and bitter. Do you perceive what I keep silent, that I do not give words to my burning breast? and I speak with the Psalmist: "Set a guard, Lord, on my mouth, and a fortified door on my lips. Do not incline my heart to words of malice." And elsewhere: "When the sinner stood against me, I was dumb, and was humbled, and kept silent from good things." And again: "I became like a man who does not hear, and has no rebukes in his mouth." But the Lord will answer you as my avenger, who says through the prophet: "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord." And in another place: "Sitting, you spoke against your brother, and set a stumbling block against your mother's son. These things you did, and I kept silent; you thought, wicked one, that I would be like you; I will rebuke you and set it before your face," so that you may see condemned in yourself what you falsely accuse in others.

I hear besides that it is objected against me by Chrysogonus, his follower, why I said that in baptism all sins are forgiven, and that when a man married twice dies, a new man rises in Christ; and that there are a number of such priests in the churches. I will answer him in brief: they have the little book which they call into accusation; let him answer it, overturn it by his argument, and refute writings by writings. Why, with austere brow and contracted, wrinkled nostrils, does he weigh out hollow words, and feign holiness before the ignoble crowd with pretended rigour? Let him hear us proclaiming again that the old Adam dies wholly in the laver, and the new is raised with Christ in baptism; the earthy perishes, and the heavenly is born. We say this not because we ourselves, by Christ's favour, are held by this question, but being asked by brothers what we thought, we answered, prejudging no one from following what he wishes, nor overturning another's decree by our opinion. For we do not seek the priesthood, we who lie hidden in our cells; nor, after our lowliness is condemned, do we hasten to buy a bishopric with gold; nor do we wish, with a rebellious mind, to slay a pontiff chosen by God; nor, by favouring heretics, do we show ourselves heretics. Money we neither have nor wish to have: "Having food and clothing, with these we are content," singing continually that saying about the one who climbs the Lord's mountain: "He who has not put out his money at usury, and has not taken gifts against the innocent: he who does these things will not be moved for ever." Therefore he who does not do them has already fallen for ever.

So far I have answered, not as I ought but as I could, with restrained pain, about the charges, or rather on behalf of my alleged crimes, which a crafty praiser once heaped on me and his disciples now press more persistently. For my purpose is not so much to accuse others as to defend myself. I will come to his Apology, by which he tries to satisfy the holy Anastasius, bishop of the city of Rome, and in his own defence builds slander against me again; and he loves me so much that, caught by a whirlwind and plunged into the depths, he grabs my foot above all, so as either to be freed with me or to perish.

He says that he is first answering the rumours by which his faith is carped at in Rome, he a man most approved both in faith and in the love of God; and that, had he not been restored to his parents after thirty years, and been unwilling to desert those whom he had seen so late, lest he be thought inhuman or hard, and had he not been too weak from the labour of so long a journey to repeat his labours, he would have wished to come in person. Since he did not, he has sent against his barkers a staff of letters, for the bishop to hold in his right hand and drive away the dogs raging against him. If he is approved by all, and especially by the bishop to whom he writes, in faith and the love of God, how is he bitten and carped at in Rome, and how does the report of his assailed reputation grow? Next, what humility is yours, to call yourself approved in faith and the love of God, when the apostles ask, "Lord, increase our faith," and hear, "If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed"; and to Peter himself it is said, "O you of little faith, why did you doubt?" What shall I say of love, which is greater than faith and hope, and which Paul wishes for rather than presumes, without which even blood shed in martyrdom and a body given to the flames has no crown of reward? Both of these this man so claims for himself that yet he has barkers against him, who, unless they are driven off by the staff of the illustrious pontiff, do not cease to bark. But that is ridiculous, that he boasts of having returned to his parents after thirty years, a man who has neither father nor mother; and those whom he left living as a young man he misses dead as an old man: unless perhaps in soldiers' and common speech he calls kinsmen and relatives "parents"; and since he does not wish to desert them, lest he be thought inhuman or hard, he has left his native place and lives at Aquileia. That most approved faith of his is in danger at Rome, and he, lying back and tired, after thirty years, cannot come in a carriage along the very easy road of the Via Flaminia; and so he pleads the weariness of a long journey, as if he had been running for thirty years, or, after sitting two years at Aquileia, were exhausted by the labour of his past journey.

"Let us pluck at the rest, and set down the very words of his letter: 'Although, then, our faith was proved, in the time of the persecution of the heretics, while we were living in the holy church of Alexandria, in prisons and exiles which were inflicted for the faith.'" I wonder that he did not add: "A prisoner of Jesus Christ, and I was delivered from the mouth of the lion, and at Alexandria I fought with beasts, and I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; there remains for me the crown of righteousness." What exiles, what prisons does he name? I am ashamed of so open a lie; as if prisons and exiles were inflicted without sentences of judges. Yet I want to know those prisons, and from which provinces he says he endured exile. And surely he has plenty of opportunity to name some one of his many prisons and countless exiles. Let him produce for us the acts of his confession, which until now we have not known, so that among the other martyrs of Alexandria we may read his deeds too, and he may say against his barkers: "From now on let no one trouble me; for I bear the marks of our Lord Jesus Christ in my body."

"Yet, even if there is anyone now who wishes either to test our faith or to hear or to learn it, let him know that we believe thus about the Trinity," and the rest. Above, you hand the bishop a staff against your dogs, armed with which he might walk on your behalf. Now, as if in doubt, you say: "If there is anyone who wishes to test our faith"; you doubt again, though the barking of many has reached you. I do not discuss for a moment your expressions, which you yourself scorn and despise; I will answer only the meaning. One thing is asked of you, and you satisfy for another. Against the doctrines of Arius you had already fought at Alexandria in prisons and exiles, not with voice but with blood. Now a charge is raised against you about the heresy of Origen. I would not have you treat wounds that are healthy. You say the Trinity is of one Godhead. Since the whole world now believes this, I think even the demons confess that the Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary and took the flesh and soul of human nature. If I ask something more closely, you will call me contentious. If you say that the Son of God took the flesh and soul of human nature, I beg you to answer without irritation: that soul which Jesus took, did it exist before he was born of Mary? Or was it created together with the body in the virgin origin, which was born of the Holy Spirit? Or, the body being already formed in the womb, was it immediately made and sent from heaven? I want to know which of the three you hold. If it existed before he was born of Mary, then it was not yet the soul of Jesus, and was doing something, and afterwards, for the merits of its virtues, became his soul. If it began by propagation, then human souls, which we confess eternal, and those of brute animals, which are dissolved with the body, have one condition. But if it is created and sent as soon as the body is formed, say so plainly, and free us from scruple.

You say none of these things, but, busy with other matters, you abuse our simplicity, and with the juggling and pomp of words do not let us stick to the question. "What," you will say, "was not the question about the resurrection of the flesh and the punishments of the devil?" I admit it. Then answer briefly and plainly. I do not ask what you write, that the same flesh in which we live will rise, with no limb cut off and no part of the body removed, for these are your words; but I ask what Origen denies: whether bodies will be raised in the same sex in which they died, and Mary will rise as Mary, John as John; or whether, the sexes mixed and confused, there will be neither man nor woman, but both or neither? And whether these bodies, incorrupt and immortal, and, as you shrewdly warn, spiritual according to the Apostle, will remain for ever; and not only bodies, but flesh and blood poured in, watering the veins and bones, which Thomas touched; or whether they will gradually be dissolved into nothing and drawn back to the four elements of which they are composed? These things you ought either to say or to deny, and not to say what Origen craftily admits, as if mocking fools and children: "with no limb cut off and no part of the body removed." No doubt we feared this, that we should rise without nose and ears, and, our genitals cut off and severed, a city of eunuchs would be founded in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Further, about the devil he tempers his opinion thus: "We say also that there is a judgment to come, in which judgment each will receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. And if men are to receive for their works, how much more the devil, who is the cause of sin for all! About whom we hold what is written in the Gospel: that both the devil himself and all his angels, with those who do his works, that is, who accuse the brothers, will together with him obtain the inheritance of eternal fire. If anyone, then, denies that the devil is consigned to eternal fires, let him receive a part with him of the eternal fire, so that he may feel what he denied." Let us go over it point by point. "We say," he says, "that there is a judgment to come, in which judgment," and so on. I had decided to keep silent about faults of words; but since his disciples admire their teacher's eloquence, I will touch on a few. He had said "a judgment to come"; but, a cautious man, he feared to say simply "in which," and put "in which judgment," lest, if he had not repeated "judgment" a second time, we, forgetting what went before, should think "ass" instead of "judgment." That too which he then brings in, "who accuse the brothers will together with him obtain the inheritance of eternal fire," is of the same charm. For who ever heard of "obtaining" fires and "enjoying" punishments? But the Greek seems to me to have wished to translate himself, and, for what among them is said klēronomēsousin, and among us can be said in one word, "will inherit," to have said, more elaborately and ornately, "will obtain the inheritance." His whole speech teems with such trifles and improprieties. But let us return to the meaning.

The devil is struck with a great spear, the cause of sin for all, if he is to render account for his works like a man, and with his angels "obtain the inheritance of eternal fire." For this was lacking, that while men are subjected to torment, he should "obtain" the eternal fires which he had so long desired. And you seem to me in this place to slander the devil, and to accuse the accuser of all with false charges. For you say, "who is the cause of sin for all"; and while you refer crimes to him, you free men from blame and take away the freedom of the will, though the Saviour says that "out of our heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies." And again we read in the Gospel of Judas: "After the morsel Satan entered into him": who had sinned of his own accord before the morsel, and was not bent to repentance either by the humility or by the clemency of the Saviour. Hence the Apostle: "Whom I delivered," he says, "to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme." And in another place: "I have delivered such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved." He delivered to Satan, as to a torturer for punishment, those who before they were delivered had blasphemed of their own will. And David: "From my hidden faults cleanse me, Lord, and from those of others spare your servant," briefly signifying both the error of his own will and the incitements of vices. In Ecclesiastes too we read: "If the spirit of one who has power rises against your heart, do not leave your place." From which it clearly appears that if we give place to one who rises, it is we who sinned in giving it, and did not hurl down headlong the enemy climbing the walls. But when you call down on the brothers, that is, on your accusers, eternal fires with the devil, you seem to me not so much to press the brothers as to lift up the devil, since he is to be punished with the same fires as Christian men. But the eternal fires, as Origen usually understands them, I think do not escape you: namely, the conscience of sins and the repentance burning the inner heart. Of which Isaiah too speaks: "Their worm will not die, and their fire will not be quenched." And it is written to Babylon: "You have coals of fire; you will sit on them; these will be a help to you." And in the Psalm the penitent hears: "What will be given you, or what added to you, against the deceitful tongue? The sharp arrows of the mighty, with desolating coals"; so that the arrows of God's commandments (of which the prophet says in another place, "I was turned in misery while the thorn was fastened in me") may wound and pierce the deceitful tongue, and make a desolation of sins in it. That testimony too in which the Lord says, "I came to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish it were kindled," he interprets thus: "I desire all to do penance, and to burn out vices and sins by the Holy Spirit. For I am he of whom it is written: 'God is a consuming fire.'" It is not a great thing, then, to say of the devil what is prepared also for men. You ought rather (to avoid suspicion of the devil's salvation) to have said: "You have become destruction, and you will not be for ever"; and, in the person of the Lord speaking to Job about the devil: "Behold, his hope will deceive him, and in the sight of all he will be cast down. I will not rouse him as one cruel. For who can resist my face? Who gave to me first, that I should repay him? All things under heaven are mine. I will not spare him, nor his mighty words composed for entreaty." But these things can be excused as those of a simple man; and though they do not escape the learned, among the unlearned they bear the likeness of innocence.

What follows about the state of souls cannot be excused at all. For he says: "I hear that questions have been raised about the soul too: whether the complaint on this matter ought to be received or rejected, you must judge. But if my view on this too is asked, I confess that I have read different things on this question in very many writers. I have read some saying that souls are spread together with the body through the propagation of human seed, and they confirmed this with what assertions they could. I think that among the Latins Tertullian held this, or Lactantius, and perhaps some others. Others assert that, when bodies have been formed in the womb, God daily makes souls and pours them in. Others, that they were made long ago, that is, when God created all things from nothing, and that now by his judgment he dispenses them to be born in the body. This Origen holds, and some other Greeks. But I, though I have read each of these (I say it with God as witness), up to the present hold nothing certain and defined on this question; but I leave it to God to know what is true, and to anyone to whom he may deign to reveal it. Yet I do not deny that I have read each of these, and I confess that I am still ignorant; except for what the church plainly hands down, that God is the maker of both souls and bodies."

Before I discuss the meaning, I will admire the words of this Theophrastus: "I hear," he says, "that questions have been raised about the soul: whether the complaint on this matter ought to be received or rejected, you must judge." If questions about the state of the soul have been raised in the City, what is this complaint or grievance, which is left to the judgment of bishops whether it should be received? Unless perhaps he thinks that "question" and "complaint" mean the same thing, because he found a figure of this kind in the commentaries of Caper. Next he puts: "I have read some saying that souls are spread together with the body through the propagation of human seed, and they confirmed this with what assertions they could." What, I ask, is this licence of figures? What confusion of moods and tenses? "I have read some saying; they confirmed with what assertions they could." And in what follows: "Others assert that, when bodies have been formed in the womb, God daily makes new souls and pours them in. Others, that they were made long ago, that is, when God created all things from nothing, and that now by his judgment he dispenses them to be born in the body." And here is a most beautiful order. "Others," he says, "assert this or that: others that they were made long ago, that is, when God created all things from nothing, and now by his judgment he dispenses them to be born in the body." He speaks so tastelessly and confusedly that I labour more in censuring than he in writing. At the end he put: "But I, though I have read each of these," and, with the sentence still hanging, as if he had brought out something new, he added: "Yet I do not deny that I have read each of these, and I confess that I am still ignorant."

O unhappy souls, wounded by such spears of faults! I do not think they laboured so much, according to Origen's error, when they fell from heaven to earth and were clothed with gross bodies, as now, dashed this way and that by words and thoughts; to pass over the indecent expression by which souls are said to be "spread through the propagation of human seed." I know that among Christians faults of words are not usually censured; but I wished to show from a few how rash it is to teach what you do not know, to write what you are ignorant of, so that we may look for a like prudence in the meaning. He sends a letter, that is, a most sturdy staff with which the bishop of the city of Rome may be armed; and on the very question for which the dogs bark, he says he does not know what is asked. If he is ignorant on the point for which he is slandered, what need is there to send an Apology which contains not a defence of himself but a confession of ignorance? This is not to lull men's suspicions but to sow them. He sets down three opinions on the state of souls, and in conclusion says: "I do not deny that I have read each, and I confess that I am still ignorant." You would think him Arcesilas or Carneades, who declare all things uncertain; though he surpasses them too in caution. For they, unable to bear the odium of all philosophers for taking truth out of life, found the probable, so as to temper their ignorance of things with probable assertion; this man says he is uncertain and does not know at all which of the three is true. If this was what he was going to answer, what reason drove him to make so great a pontiff witness of his ignorance? No doubt this is that weariness, that, exhausted by a journey of thirty years, he could not come to Rome. How many other things we do not know, and yet we do not seek witnesses of our ignorance! About the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, about the birth of the Lord Saviour, of which Isaiah cries out, "Who will declare his generation?", he speaks boldly, and claims for his knowledge the mystery unknown to all past ages; and this alone he does not know, the ignorance of which causes scandal to all. He knows how the Virgin bore God, and does not know how he himself was born. He confesses the Lord as maker of souls and bodies, whether souls existed before bodies, or are born with the beginnings of bodies, or are sent into bodies already formed and shaped in the womb. In all of them we know the Lord as author. Nor is the question now whether God or another made them; but of the three he has set down, he says he does not know which opinion is true. Beware lest it be at once objected to you that you confess ignorance of the three so as not to be forced to condemn one; and spare Tertullian and Lactantius so as not to slay Origen with them. As far as memory serves, unless I am mistaken, I do not know that I have read that Lactantius says the soul is propagated. But you, who write that you have read it, say in which book you read it, lest you seem to have slandered him dead, as you did me asleep. But in this too you go hesitant and cautious. For you say: "I think that among the Latins Tertullian held this, or Lactantius, perhaps some others too." Not only do you doubt about the state of souls, but about the writers' views you "think"; and yet there is some difference. About souls you openly do not know, and confess your ignorance; about the writers you say you know in such a way that you think rather than presume. Only about Origen are you not in doubt. For you say, "This Origen holds." I will ask you: does he hold it rightly or wrongly? "I do not know," you say. Why then do you try, by sending couriers and very frequent messengers, to teach me so that I may know what you do not know? And lest perhaps I should not believe your inexperience, and think you craftily keep silent what you know, you swear with God as witness that up to the present you hold nothing certain and defined on this question, and leave it to God to know what is true, and to anyone to whom he may deign to reveal it. Through so many ages does no one seem to you to have been worthy that the Lord should reveal this question to him? Not a patriarch, not a prophet, not an apostle, not a martyr? Not even to you, when you were living in prisons and exiles, were such mysteries opened? The Lord in the Gospel says, "Father, I have revealed your name to men." He who revealed the Father was silent about the state of souls: and do you wonder if scandals of the brothers are stirred up against you, when you swear that you do not know what the churches of Christ profess they know?

Who gave you this licence, to cut away much in the translation? You were asked to turn Greek into Latin, not to correct it; to bring out another's sayings, not to compose your own. By cutting away very much you confess that you did not do what you were asked. And would that you had cut off the evil things, and had not set down many of your own in assertion of evils! Of these I will bring forward one, so that the rest may be known from it. In the first book Peri Archon, where Origen blasphemed with sacrilegious tongue that the Son does not see the Father, you even give reasons, as if in the person of him who wrote, and you translate the scholium of Didymus, in which he tries with vain labour to defend another's error, saying that Origen spoke rightly but that we simple men, Ennius's tame creatures, cannot understand either his wisdom or yours who translated it. Your preface, as you call it, in which you adorn me with wonderful praises, makes you guilty of a most wicked translation. For you say that you cut away much from the Greek, though you keep silent about what you added. What you cut away, was it bad or good? Surely bad. What you kept, good or bad? Surely good. For you could not translate bad things. Then you cut off the bad and left the good? No one doubts it. But what was translated is proved to be almost all bad. Whatever bad thing, then, I show in the translation will be imputed to you, who translated it as good. It is another matter if, as an unjust censor guilty of the same crime, you drive some from the senate and keep others in the senate-house. But you say: "I could not change everything, but I thought I should cut away only what I judged had been added by heretics." Fine. If you cut away what you thought added by heretics, then what you left belongs to the one you translated: answer, is it good or bad? You could not translate bad things; for you had once for all cut away what had been added by heretics. Unless perhaps you were bound to cut away the heretics' evils and to turn Origen's errors whole into Latin. Say, then, why you turned Origen's evils into Latin: to expose the author of evil, or to praise him? If you expose him, why do you praise him in the preface? If you praise him, you are proved a heretic. It remains that you brought them out as good. If all these are proved bad, then both author and translator will be guilty of one crime, and that saying will be fulfilled: "You saw a thief and ran with him, and you threw in your lot with adulterers." There is no need to make a plain matter doubtful by argument. As to what follows, let him answer whence arose his suspicion that these things were added by heretics. "Because," he says, "I had read things said catholically on the same matters in other places of the same author."

Let us see what the first point is, so that we may come in order to the second. I prove, among Origen's many evils, these to be especially heretical: that the Son of God is a creature; the Holy Spirit a minister; innumerable worlds, succeeding one another in eternal ages; angels turned into human souls; that the Saviour's soul existed before he was born of Mary, and that it was this which, "being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant"; that the resurrection of our bodies will be such that they will not have the same members, since, the functions of the members ceasing, the members are rendered superfluous; and that these bodies, thin and spiritual, gradually vanish and are dissipated into thin air and into nothing; that in the restoration of all things, when the imperial pardon comes, cherubim and seraphim, thrones, principalities, dominions, virtues, powers, archangels, angels, the devil, demons, the souls of all men, Christians as well as Jews and Gentiles, will be of one condition and measure; and when they have come to the form and balance of equality, and the new army of a people returning from the exile of the world has displayed rational creatures with every dreg of bodies laid aside, then again from another beginning another world will be made, and other bodies, with which souls falling from heaven may be clothed, so that we must fear lest we who are now men may afterwards be born women, and she who today is a virgin may then perhaps be a prostitute. These things in Origen's books I teach to be heretical: you show in which of his works you have read things contrary to them.

Do not say to me, "things I had read said catholically on the same matters in other places of the same author"; and do not send me to his six thousand books, which you charge the blessed Pope Epiphanius with having read; but name the very places: and even this will not satisfy me unless you bring out the same sayings word for word. Origen is no fool, and I know it: he cannot speak contradictions. From this reckoning, then, that conclusion arises: that what you cut away was not the heretics' but Origen's, whose evils you translated because you thought them good; and that both his good and his bad are to be imputed to you, who approved his writings in your prologue.

There follows in the same Apology: "I am neither the defender of Origen nor his champion, nor his first translator. Others before me did this same work: I too did it, last, at the request of the brothers. If it is ordered that it should not be done, an order is usually observed for the future. If those who did it before the order are blamed, let the blame begin with the first." At last he has vomited what he wanted, and all the swelling of his mind has burst out into ill-will against us. When he translates the books Peri Archon, he says he follows me; when he is accused for doing it, he puts forward my example; secure or in danger, he cannot live without me. Let him hear, then, what he pretends not to know. No one objects to you that you translated Origen; otherwise Hilary and Ambrose will be held guilty of this crime; but that you confirmed heretical things which you translated with the praise of your preface. I myself, whom you call to account, translated seventy of his homilies and some of the tomes in such a way as both to take away the evil in the translation of the good, and in the books Peri Archon to show openly, in order to refute your translation, what the reader should avoid. Do you wish to turn Origen into Latin? You have many homilies and tomes of his in which moral matters are treated and the obscurities of the Scriptures opened. Translate these; give these to those who ask. Why does your first labour begin with infamy? Why, when about to translate heretical things, do you put in front, in their defence, the book of a martyr, so to speak, and press on Roman ears what the whole world trembled at when translated? Or at least, if you translate in order to prove him a heretic, change nothing from the Greek, and testify this very thing in the preface, as Pope Anastasius most prudently included in his own words in the letter which he writes against you to Bishop John, freeing me, who did this, and censuring you, who would not do it. And lest perhaps you deny this too, I have appended a copy of it; so that, if you will not hear a brother warning, you may hear a bishop condemning.

You say that you are not the defender or champion of Origen: I will now bring forward your book, of which you speak in these words in that famous little preface of your splendid work: "The cause of this inconsistency I have set out for you more fully in the Apology which Pamphilus wrote for his books, adding a very short treatise in which I showed by clear proofs, as I think, that his books have been corrupted in very many places by heretics and ill-wishers, and especially these which you now require me to translate, that is, Peri Archon." Was not the defence of Origen by Eusebius, or at least, as you will have it, by Pamphilus, enough for you, unless you added, as wiser and more learned, what you thought they had said too little? It would be long if I wished to insert your whole book in this work and, setting out the headings, answer each point: what faults of language it has, what lies in its assertions, what inconsistency in the very texture of its words. So, avoiding the tedium of a ragged discussion and packing my words close, I will answer only the meaning. Going out of harbour, he at once ran his ship aground. For, speaking of the Apology of the martyr Pamphilus (which we have proved to be Eusebius's, the chief of the Arians), about which he had said, "We have set it out in Latin as we could, or as the matter required," he added: "This is what I want you to be reminded of, Macarius, man of desires: that you may know that this rule of faith, which we have set out above from his books, is such as is to be embraced and held. For in all these the catholic sense is clearly proved to be present." Although he took much away from Eusebius's book and tried to change it for the better concerning the Son and the Holy Spirit, yet many stumbling blocks are found in it, and most open blasphemies, which he cannot deny are his, since he pronounces them catholic. Eusebius, or rather (as you will have it) Pamphilus, says in that volume that the Son is the minister of the Father; that the Holy Spirit is not of the same substance as the Father and the Son; that the souls of men have fallen from heaven, and that in what we are we have been changed from angels; that in the restoration of all things angels, demons and men will be equal; and many other things so impious and wicked that even to repeat them would be a crime. What will the champion of Origen and translator of Pamphilus do? If in what he corrected there is such blasphemy, how great sacrileges are contained in what he pretends was falsified by heretics? The cause of this opinion of his he supposes to be that a man neither foolish nor mad could not say things contradicting himself. And lest perhaps we should think that he wrote different things at different times and published contradictory things according to his age, he added: "What are we to do, that sometimes in the same places, and, so to speak, almost in the following chapter, a sentence of contrary sense is found inserted? Could he, in the same work of the same book, and sometimes, as we said, immediately in the following chapter, have forgotten himself? For example, that he who had said above that it is nowhere found in all Scripture that the Holy Spirit was said to be made or created, should immediately add that the Holy Spirit was made among the other creatures? Or again, could he who declared the Father and the Son to be of one substance, which in Greek is called homoousios, say in the following chapters immediately that he whom shortly before he had declared born of the very nature of God the Father was of another substance and created?"

These are his words; he cannot deny it. Do not say, "For example, he who had said above"; but name the book itself, where he first spoke well and afterwards badly, where, having written that the Holy Spirit and the Son are of the substance of God the Father, he immediately in what follows asserted them to be creatures. Do you not know that I have all of Origen's works, and have read very many?

Yet let us see by what arguments he tries to prove that Origen's writings were corrupted by heretics. "Clement," he says, "the disciple of the apostles, who was bishop and martyr of the Roman church after the apostles, published books called Anagnōrismoi, that is, Recognition, in which, while in very many places doctrine as truly apostolic is set out in the person of the apostle Peter, in some the doctrine of Eunomius is so inserted that one would think it was none other than Eunomius himself disputing, asserting that the Son of God was created from nothing." And after other things which it would be long to write: "What, I ask," he says, "are we to think of this, that an apostolic man wrote heretical things? Or is it rather to be believed that perverse men, to assert their own doctrines, inserted under the name of holy men, as more easily believed, things which they must be believed neither to have thought nor to have written?" He writes also that Clement, presbyter of the church of Alexandria, a catholic man, sometimes says in his books that the Son of God was created; and that Dionysius, bishop of the city of Alexandria, a most learned man, while arguing in four volumes against Sabellius, slipped into the Arian doctrine. And under these examples he tries to testify, not that churchmen and catholics thought wrongly, but that their writings were corrupted by heretics; and he concludes at the end, saying: "About Origen too, in whom likewise, as in those we mentioned above, a certain inconsistency is found, let it not suffice to think what is thought or understood about men already judged catholic, lest for a like case a like excuse should not suffice." If it is granted that whatever harmful thing is found in books has been corrupted by others, nothing will belong to those under whose names they go; it will be credited to those by whom it is said to have been corrupted. And yet it will not be theirs either, since their names are uncertain; and so it will come about that, while everything belongs to everyone, nothing belongs to anyone. By this confusion of defence neither Marcion, nor the Manichaeans, nor Arius, nor Eunomius can be accused: because whatever we object to as impiously said by them, their disciples will answer that it was not so published by their masters but violated by enemies. In this way this very book of yours will not be yours, but perhaps mine. And my book, in which, accused, I answer you, if you censure anything in it, will not be mine but yours, by whom it is censured. And while you refer everything to the heretics, what will you assign to churchmen, to whom you leave nothing of their own? "And how," you will say, "are there some faulty things in their books?" If I answer that I do not know the causes of the faults, I will not at once judge them heretics. For it may be that they either erred in simplicity, or wrote in another sense, or their writings were gradually corrupted by unskilled copyists. Or certainly, before Arius was born in Alexandria like a noonday demon, they spoke some things innocently and less cautiously, which could not escape the slander of perverse men. Crimes are charged against Origen, and you do not defend him but accuse others; you do not deny the crime, but seek a crowd of criminals. If you were asked whom Origen has as partners in heresy, you would rightly bring these forward. Now you are asked whether what is found written in Origen's books is good or bad. You are silent, and speak of other things instead. "Clement says this; Dionysius is caught in this error; Bishop Athanasius defends Dionysius's error so; the writings of the apostles were likewise corrupted": just as now you are charged by others with the crime of heresy, and you are silent for yourself and confess for me. I accuse no one, content to have answered for myself. I am not what you charge: if you are what you are accused of, you must see to it. Neither my acquittal nor your guilt will prove me or you either innocent or liable to the charge.

Having set out the falsification by heretics of the apostles, of both Clements, and of Dionysius, he comes to Origen and speaks in these words: "We have proved this from his own writings and words, complaining and lamenting it. For what he himself suffered while still living in the flesh, feeling and seeing it, from the corruptions of his books or discourses, or from adulterated editions, is clearly shown from his letter which he writes to certain dear friends at Alexandria." And at once he appends a copy of the letter; and he who imputes the falsity of Origen's writings to heretics himself begins with falsity, not translating as it stands in the Greek, nor conveying to the Latins what Origen himself professes in his letter. For while that whole letter tears Demetrius, bishop of the city of Alexandria, and inveighs against the bishops and clergy of the whole world, and says that he was excommunicated by the churches in vain, and that he does not wish to return curses, so as not to seem a reviler, being a man so cautious in reviling that he does not dare to revile even the devil; whence also he gave Candidus, a follower of the Valentinian doctrine, an occasion to slander him, as having said that the devil is of a nature to be saved; Rufinus, hiding the argument of the letter, invents for Origen what he does not say. Therefore I have translated a little of the letter from the earlier part and joined it to what he translated in fragments and deceitfully, so that the reader may know with what purpose he kept silent about the earlier part. Disputing, then, against the priests of the church in general, by whom he had been judged unworthy of their communion, Origen added this: "What need is there to speak of the words of the prophets, in which they very often threaten and rebuke shepherds, and elders, and priests, and princes of the people? These things you can draw out from the holy Scriptures without us, and see clearly that perhaps this is the time of which it is said: 'Do not trust friends, nor hope in princes'; and now the prophecy is fulfilled: 'The leaders of my people did not know me; they are foolish sons and not wise. They are wise to do evil, but to do good they do not know'; whom we ought rather to pity than hate, and to pray for them rather than curse them. For we were created for blessing, not for cursing. Hence Michael too, when he disputed with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a judgment of blasphemy even against so great an evil, but said, 'The Lord rebuke you.' Something like this we read also in Zechariah: 'The Lord rebuke you, devil; and the Lord who chose Jerusalem rebuke you.' And so we too desire that those who will not be rebuked with humility by their neighbours should be rebuked by the Lord. But when Michael says, 'The Lord rebuke you, devil,' and Zechariah likewise, whether God rebukes the devil or does not rebuke him, he will see; and if he rebukes him, how he rebukes him, he will know." And after much which it would be long to write, he adds: "We hold that not only those who sinned greatly will be cast out of the kingdom of heaven, for example, fornicators, adulterers, sodomites, and thieves, but also those who offended in lesser things, because it is written: 'Neither drunkards nor revilers will possess the kingdom of God'; and that there is a measure both in the goodness and in the severity of God. Therefore we strive to do all things with counsel, in drinking wine too and in moderation of speech, so that we dare to curse no one. Since, then, for fear of God we take care not to bring curses on anyone, remembering that saying, 'He did not dare to bring a judgment of blasphemy,' which is said of Michael against the devil, and in another place, 'They reject dominions and blaspheme glories,' some of those who gladly find contentions ascribe to us and to our doctrine a blasphemy, about which they must see how they hear that saying, 'Neither drunkards nor revilers will possess the kingdom of God'; although they say that the father of malice and of the destruction of those who will be cast out of the kingdom of God can be saved, which no one could say even if out of his mind." The rest of the letter he translated in place of what we have rendered at the end of Origen's words, "Since, then, for fear of God we take care not to bring curses on anyone," and so on. He, fraudulently cutting off the earlier part on which the later depends, began to translate the letter as if this were the beginning in this sense, and says: "Some of those who like to accuse their neighbours ascribe to us and to our doctrine the crime of blasphemy, which they never heard from us; let them see to it, being unwilling to keep that commandment which says that revilers will not possess the kingdom of God; saying that I assert that the father of malice and of the destruction of those who are cast out of the kingdom of God, that is, the devil, is to be saved: which no one, even moved in mind and plainly insane, could say."

Compare Origen's words, which I translated above word for word, with those not turned but overturned by him, and you will see how great a discrepancy they have between them, not only of words but of meanings. I beg you not to be annoyed by a rather long translation. For we translated everything to prove with what purpose he kept silent about the earlier part. There is a dialogue among the Greeks between Origen and Candidus, a defender of the Valentinian heresy, in which I confess I watched two blindfolded gladiators fighting each other. Candidus says that the Son is of the Father's substance, erring in this, that he asserts a probolē, that is, an emission. Origen on the other side, like Arius and Eunomius, resists his being either emitted or born, lest God the Father be divided into parts; but he says that he came into being as a sublime and most excellent creature by the Father's will, as did the other creatures. Again they come to the second question. Candidus asserts that the devil is of a most wicked nature, one that can never be saved. Against this Origen rightly answered that he is not of a substance doomed to perish, but fell by his own will and can be saved. This Candidus turned into slander, as if Origen had said that the devil's nature is to be saved: what that man had falsely objected, this one refutes. And we understand that only in this dialogue is heretical falsification charged by Origen, and not in the other books, about which there was never a question. Otherwise, if all heretical things are not Origen's but the heretics', and almost all his tomes are full of these errors, nothing will be Origen's, but theirs whose names we do not know. It is not enough for him to slander the Greeks and the ancients, about whom, because of the antiquity of the times and distance of the regions, he has licence to lie as he pleases: he comes to the Latins, and first puts Hilary the confessor, saying that after the synod of Rimini his book was falsified by heretics; and that for this reason, when a question was raised against him in a council of bishops, he ordered the book to be brought from his house, which, without his knowing, was kept heretical in his book chests; and that when it was brought out and judged heretical by all, the author was excommunicated and left the meeting of the council. And he thinks himself of such authority that, when he tells his friends this dream, no one dares to contradict him as he invents these things against a confessor. Answer, I pray: the synod by which he was excommunicated, in what city was it? Tell the names of the bishops; bring out the judgments of the signatures, their diversity or agreement. Tell who were consuls that year, which emperor ordered this synod to be gathered; whether there were bishops of Gaul only, or also of Italy and Spain; certainly for what cause the synod was gathered. You name none of these, but, to defend Origen, you accuse a most eloquent man, the trumpet of the Latin tongue against the Arians, of having been excommunicated by a synod. But the slander of a confessor may somehow be borne. He passes to the illustrious martyr Cyprian, and says that Tertullian's book entitled On the Trinity is read under his name at Constantinople by heretics of the Macedonian party. In this charge he tells two lies. For it is neither Tertullian's book nor said to be Cyprian's, but Novatian's, under whose title it is inscribed; and the author's eloquence and the character of the style show it.

And I think it superfluous to refute open absurdities, when my own little story is thrust on me: from a synod, namely, and under the name of a certain friend of Damasus, bishop of the city of Rome, to whom he entrusted the dictating of the church's letters, I am aimed at; and the cunning of the Apollinarians is described, how, having received Athanasius's book, where "the Lordly man" is written, to read, they so corrupted it that, in the erasure, they wrote again what they had erased, so that it might be thought not to have been falsified by them but added by me. I beg you, dearest friend, in church treatises, where the truth of doctrines is sought and the authority of our elders demanded for the salvation of our souls, to drop such ravings, and not to hold the tales of lunches and dinners as an argument for truth. For it may be that, even if you heard the truth from me, another who does not know the matter will say that it was composed by you, like a mime of Philistion, or a trick of Lentulus and Marullus, invented in elegant language.

Where will reckless daring, once unbridled, not go? After the excommunication of Hilary, after the pseudepigraphal book of heresy of Cyprian, after the erasure of Athanasius while I was asleep, and of the inscriptions as well, he has at last burst out against Pope Epiphanius, and pours out the pain of his heart, because Epiphanius, in the letter he had written to Bishop John, accused him as a heretic, in his Apology for Origen, and consoles himself with these words: "Rather, the hidden truth must be opened in this place. For it is not possible for any man to use so unjust a judgment as not to think equally about an equal case. But the authors of the detractions against him are those who usually discuss at length in the church, or even write books, all of which they either speak or write from Origen. So that more people may not know their thefts, which certainly, if they were not ungrateful to their master, would by no means seem criminal, they deter all the simpler people from reading him. In short, one of them, who thinks he has, as it were, a necessity of evangelizing through all nations and all tongues by speaking ill of Origen, confessed, in the hearing of a very great multitude of brothers, that he had read six thousand of his books. If indeed (as he himself is wont to say) he read them to learn his evils, ten books could have sufficed to learn them, or certainly twenty, or at most thirty. But to read six thousand books is no longer to wish to know errors and evils, but to give almost one's whole life to his teachings and studies. How then is he rightly to be heard, when he blames those who for their own instruction have read very few of his works (saving the rule of faith and with piety intact)?"

Who are these who usually discuss at length in the church? who write books? who speak and write everything from Origen? who, not wishing their thefts to be known, and being ungrateful to their master, therefore deter the simple from reading him? You ought to say so by name and mark the men themselves. Are, then, the blessed bishops Anastasius, and Theophilus, and Venerius (of Milan), and Chromatius (of Aquileia), and the whole synod of catholics both of the East and of the West, who with equal judgment, because with equal spirit, declare him a heretic to the peoples, to be judged thieves of his books? And when they preach in the churches, do they recount not the mysteries of the Scriptures but the thefts of Origen? Is not your disparagement against everyone everywhere enough for you, unless you direct the spear of your pen especially against a blessed and distinguished priest of the church? Who is he who thinks he has, as it were, a necessity of evangelizing through all nations and all tongues by speaking ill of Origen? who confessed, in the hearing of a very great multitude of brothers, that he had read six thousand of his books? In that multitude and crowd of brothers you too were in the middle, when he complains in his letter that wicked doctrines were brought forward by you for Origen's heresy. Is it to be charged as a crime against him that he knew Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, and Egyptian, and in part Latin? Then the apostles and apostolic men who spoke in tongues are in crime; and will you, a man of two tongues, laugh at me, a man of three? As for the six thousand books which you pretend he read, who will believe either that you tell the truth or that he could have lied? For if Origen had written six thousand books, it could be that a most learned man, instructed from infancy in the sacred writings, would have read another's out of curiosity and for knowledge. But what Origen did not write, how could this man read? Count the lists of his books which are contained in the third volume of Eusebius, in which he wrote the life of Pamphilus, and you will find, I do not say six thousand, but not a third part. We have the letter of the aforesaid pontiff, in which, while you were still in the East, he answers this slander of yours and refutes the most open lie with the free brow of truth.

After these and such great things, you dare to say in your Apology that you are not the defender or champion of Origen, for whose defence Pamphilus and Eusebius seemed to you to have said too little. Against those volumes (if the Lord gives me length of this life) I will try to answer elsewhere. For now let it suffice to have met your assertions, and briefly to have instructed the prudent reader that I first saw this book, which went under the name of Pamphilus, written in your manuscript; and since it was no concern of mine what was said for a heretic, I always held it as if the work of Pamphilus and of Eusebius were different. But afterwards, when the question was raised, I wished to answer their writings, and for this reason read what each thought for Origen, and plainly discovered that the first book of Eusebius's six volumes was the very one which alone you published under the name of Pamphilus, both in Greek and in Latin, with only the meanings about the Son and the Holy Spirit changed, which displayed open blasphemy. Hence also, about ten years ago, when my friend Dexter, who held the prefecture of the praetorium, asked me to weave a catalogue of the writers of our religion, I put this book too among the other writers as published by Pamphilus, thinking it was so, as it had been spread abroad by you and your disciples. But since Eusebius himself says that Pamphilus wrote nothing except short letters to friends, and the first book of his six volumes contains the same things in the same words that were feigned by you under the name of Pamphilus, it is plain that you wished to spread this book abroad in order to bring in heresy under the person of a martyr. And since you have corrupted much of this very book which you pretend is Pamphilus's, and it is one thing in Greek, another in Latin, you ought not to impute your fraud to my error. For I believed it to be the book of him whose name the title bore, just as with the Peri Archon and many other works of Origen and of very many Greek writers, which I either did not read before, or am now compelled to read, the question of heresy having been raised, so that I may know what I ought to avoid, what to approve. Hence too in my youth I simply translated, for those who asked, only his homilies which he spoke to the people, in which there were not such great stumbling blocks, prejudicing no one by those that are approved to accept those that are manifestly heretical. Certainly (to cut short a long speech), as I show that I received the book from those who copied it from your manuscript, so you show from whom you received the copy, so that he who cannot give another as author of the book may be held guilty of the falsehood. "The good man out of the good treasure of the heart brings forth good things"; and from the sweetness of the fruit the tree of noble seed is known.

Brother Eusebius writes that, among the African bishops who had come to the court on church business, he found a letter written as if in my name, in which I did penance and testified that I had been led on in youth by the Hebrews to translate the Hebrew volumes into Latin, in which there is no truth. Hearing this, I was astounded. And since "in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word stands," and one witness was not believed even if he were Cato, the letters of many brothers from the City told me the same thing, asking whether it was so, and tearfully indicating by whom the letter had been spread among the people. He who dared to do this, what would he not dare? It is well that malice has not as much strength as effort. Innocence would have perished if power were always joined to wickedness, and slander prevailed in all it desires. My style, such as it is, and my form of speech the most eloquent man could not reproduce; but amid the very tricks and another's person, with which he had fraudulently clothed himself, he showed who he was. So he who had forged under my name a letter of penance for having badly translated the Hebrew volumes is said to object that I translated the holy Scriptures to condemn the Seventy; so that, whether what I translated is false or true, I remain under the charge: for either I confess I erred in the new work, or the recent edition is a condemnation of the old. I wonder that in the same letter he did not call me a murderer, an adulterer, a sacrilegious man, a parricide, and whatever foulness the silent thought of the mind can turn over within itself. I owe him thanks that, with so great a forest of crimes, he charged me with only one crime of error or falsehood. Did I say anything against the Seventy translators, whom many years ago I gave, most carefully corrected, to the students of my own tongue, whom I expound daily in the assembly of the brothers, whose Psalms I sing in constant meditation? Was I so foolish as to wish to forget as an old man what I learned as a boy? All my treatises are woven with their testimonies. My commentaries on the twelve prophets expound both my edition and the Seventy's. O labours of men, always uncertain! O pursuits of mortals, sometimes having contrary ends! In what I thought I deserved well of my Latins, and stirred the minds of our people to learning, since even the Greeks do not disdain a version from the Latin after so many translators, there I am called to blame, and I am forcing food on a nauseated stomach. And what in a man is safe, if innocence is criminal? While the father of the household slept, an enemy sowed tares over the wheat. "The boar from the forest has ravaged the vineyard, and the solitary wild beast has fed on it." I keep silent, and letters not mine speak against me. I do not know the crime, and I confess the crime in the whole world. "Woe is me, my mother, why did you bear me, a man to be judged and condemned by all the earth?"

All the short prefaces to the Old Instrument, of which I have appended examples in part, are witnesses of this. And it is superfluous to write otherwise than was said there. I will begin, then, with Genesis, whose prologue is this: "I have received the longed-for letters of my Desiderius, who, by a kind of presage of the future, has been allotted the same name as Daniel, begging me to hand to the ears of our people the Pentateuch translated from the Hebrew tongue into Latin. A dangerous work certainly, and open to the barking of detractors, who assert that I forge new things for old to discredit the Seventy translators, testing genius as if it were wine, though I have very often testified that I offer in the tabernacle of God what I can according to my share, and that another's wealth is not stained by others' poverty. What emboldened me to this was the zeal of Origen, who mixed Theodotion's translation with the old edition, marking the whole work with the asterisk and obelus, that is, a star and a spit, either making to shine what was lacking before, or cutting the throat of and piercing everything superfluous; and above all what the authority of the evangelists and apostles proclaimed, in which we read many things from the Old Testament which are not in our manuscripts, such as this: 'Out of Egypt I called my son'; and, 'For he shall be called a Nazarene'; and, 'They shall look on him whom they pierced'; and, 'Rivers of living water shall flow from his belly'; and, 'What eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him'; and many others which call for a treatise of their own. Let us ask them, then, where these are written; and when they cannot say, let us bring them out of the Hebrew books. The first testimony is in Hosea, the second in Isaiah, the third in Zechariah, the fourth in Proverbs, the fifth likewise in Isaiah. Not knowing this, many follow the ravings of apocrypha and prefer Iberian trifles to authentic books. It is not my part to set out the causes of the error. The Jews say it was done by prudent counsel, lest Ptolemy, a worshipper of one God, should detect among the Hebrews too a double divinity; which they did above all because he seemed to be falling into Plato's doctrine. Finally, wherever Scripture testifies something sacred about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, they either translated it otherwise or were entirely silent, so as both to satisfy the king and not to divulge the secret of the faith. And I do not know who first built with his lie the seventy cells at Alexandria, in which, divided, they wrote the same things, since Aristeas, the champion of that same Ptolemy, and much later Josephus, report nothing of the kind, but write that they compared their work gathered in one hall, not that they prophesied. For it is one thing to be a prophet, another to be a translator. There the Spirit foretells things to come; here learning and wealth of words translate what is understood. Unless perhaps Tully is to be thought to have translated Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Plato's Protagoras, and Demosthenes' speech for Ctesiphon inspired by a rhetorical spirit; so that the Holy Spirit wove testimonies of the same books one way through the Seventy translators and another way through the apostles, so that what the former kept silent, the latter lied was written. What then? Do we condemn the ancients? By no means. But after the studies of our predecessors we labour as we can in the Lord's house. They translated before the coming of Christ, and what they did not know they set out in doubtful sentences. We, after his passion and resurrection, write not so much prophecy as history. For things heard are narrated one way, things seen another. What we understand better, we also express better. Hear, then, rival; listen, detractor: I do not condemn, I do not censure the Seventy; but I confidently prefer the apostles to all of them. Through their mouth Christ speaks to me, whom I read are placed among the spiritual gifts before prophets, among which translators hold almost the last rank. Why are you tormented with spite? Why do you stir up the minds of the unskilled against me? If anywhere I seem to you to err in translation, ask the Hebrews, consult the teachers of different cities: what they have about Christ, your manuscripts do not have. It is another matter if they have since proved against themselves the testimonies used by the apostles, and the Latin copies are more correct than the Greek, the Greek than the Hebrew."

In the books of Samuel and Malachim too, which we call the four of Kingdoms, after the catalogue of divine Scripture I added this: "Since these things are so, I beg you, reader, not to think my labour a censure of the ancients. In the tabernacle of God each offers what he can: some gold and silver and precious stones; others offer fine linen and purple and scarlet and blue. It goes well with us if we offer skins and goats' hair. And yet the Apostle judges our more contemptible parts more necessary. Hence the whole beauty of the tabernacle, and the distinction, by its several kinds, of the present and future church, is covered with skins and haircloth; and the things that are cheaper keep off the heat of the sun and the harm of the rains." See with how proud a brow I swell against the Seventy translators, that I profess that they offered gold and precious stones and purple in the tabernacle of God, and I skins and goats' hair!

I will set down another testimony too, lest you say that I have now changed my opinion under the compulsion of circumstances. In the book of Times, that is, Paralipomenon, which in Hebrew is called Dibre Yamim, I used this short preface to the holy Pope Chromatius: "If the edition of the Seventy translators remained pure, and as it was turned by them into Greek, you would urge me superfluously, my Chromatius, most holy and most learned of bishops, to translate the Hebrew volumes for you into Latin. For what had once occupied the ears of men and strengthened the faith of the newborn church was rightly approved by our silence too. But now, since different copies circulate according to the variety of regions, and that genuine and ancient translation has been corrupted and violated, you think it lies with my judgment either to decide from several which is true, or to forge a new work within the old work, and, while the Jews mock, to pierce the eyes of crows, as they say. Alexandria and Egypt praise Hesychius as the author of their Seventy. Constantinople as far as Antioch approves the copies of the martyr Lucian. The provinces between these read the Palestinian manuscripts, which, prepared by Origen, Eusebius and Pamphilus published; and the whole world fights within itself with this threefold variety. And certainly Origen not only composed copies of four editions, writing each word opposite, so that one dissenting is at once refuted by the others agreeing among themselves; but, what is of greater daring, in the edition of the Seventy he mixed Theodotion's edition, marking with asterisks what was lacking and with little rods what seemed added superfluously. If, then, others were permitted not to keep what they had once received, and after the seventy cells, which are commonly bandied about without author, they opened single cells, and in the churches is read what the Seventy did not know, why should my Latins not receive me, who, leaving the old edition inviolate, have composed a new one in such a way as to prove my labour by the Hebrews and (what is greater than they) by the apostles as authors? I recently wrote a book on the best kind of translating, showing that those words of the Gospel, 'Out of Egypt I called my son,' and 'For he shall be called a Nazarene,' and 'They shall look on him whom they pierced,' and that of the Apostle, 'What eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what the Lord has prepared for those who love him,' and others like them, are found in the books of the Hebrews. Certainly the Apostle and the evangelists knew the Seventy translators. And whence have they the ability to say what is not in the Seventy? And Christ our Lord, founder of both Testaments, says in the Gospel according to John: 'He who believes in me, as the Scripture says, rivers of living water shall flow from his belly.' Certainly it is written, what the Saviour testifies is written. Where is it written? The Seventy do not have it; the church does not know apocrypha. We must return, then, to the Hebrews, from whom both the Lord speaks and the disciples take their examples. I say these things with the leave of the ancients, and answer only my detractors, who gnaw me with a dog's tooth, disparaging me in public, reading in corners, at once accusers and defenders, since they approve in others what they reject in me, as if virtue and vice were not in things but changed with the author. For the rest, I remember that I long ago gave our people the edition of the Seventy translators corrected from the Greek, and that I ought not to be thought an enemy of those whom I always expound in the assembly of the brothers. And that I have now translated Dibre Yamim, that is, Words of Days, I did so that I might set out more plainly, and by cola of verses, the inextricable delays and the forest of names, which were confused by the fault of copyists, and the barbarism of the meanings, singing, like Ismenias, to myself and to my own, if the ears of others are deaf."

In the volume of Ezra I prefaced similar things, and after much else added this: "What I am about to bring in is most fair. I have published something which is not in the Greek, or is otherwise than I have turned it. Why do they tear the translator? Let them ask the Hebrews, and on their authority either grant or withhold credit from my translation. It is another matter if, with eyes closed, as they say, they wish to curse me, and do not imitate the zeal and goodwill of the Greeks, who after the Seventy translators, when the Gospel of Christ was already shining, curiously read Jews and Ebionites as translators of the old law, namely Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, and through Origen's labour dedicated them in the Hexapla to the churches: how much more ought my Latins to be grateful, that they see exulting Greece borrowing something from them! For in the first place it is a matter of great expense and infinite difficulty to have all the copies. And then those who have them and are ignorant of the Hebrew tongue will err the more, not knowing which of the many said the truer thing. This happened recently to a certain very wise man among the Greeks, that sometimes, leaving the sense of Scripture, he followed the error of some one translator. But we, who have at least a little knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, and in some fashion do not lack Latin speech, can both judge better of the others and express in our own tongue what we ourselves understand."

I will pass to the book of Job, which, after the edition of the Seventy translators which Origen marked with obeli and asterisks, had been given to the Latin tongue many years ago; when I turned it again according to the Hebrew itself, I spoke thus: "I am forced in each book of divine Scripture to answer the curses of adversaries, who charge my translation as a censure of the Seventy translators: as if among the Greeks too Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion had not expressed either word for word, or sense for sense, or a kind of translation mixed of both and tempered in between; and as if Origen had not marked all the volumes of the Old Instrument with obeli and asterisks, which he inserted into the ancient translation either as additions or as taken from Theodotion, proving that what was added had been lacking. Let my detractors learn, then, to receive in the whole what they have accepted in parts, or else erase my translation together with their asterisks. For it cannot be that those whom they perceive to have left out much, they do not also confess to have erred in some things: especially in Job, from which, if you take away what has been added under asterisks, the greatest part will be cut off. And this among the Greeks only. But among the Latins, before the translation which we recently published under asterisks and obeli, about seven or eight hundred lines are missing, so that the book, mutilated, torn, and gnawed, shows its foulness to those who read it publicly." And after much which I pass over for brevity's sake, I added this at the end: "Let my dogs hear, then, that I laboured on this volume not to censure the ancient translation, but that what in it is either obscure, or omitted, or at any rate corrupted by the fault of copyists, might be made plainer by our translation, who have learned the Hebrew tongue in part, and in Latin have been worn almost from the cradle among grammarians, rhetoricians and philosophers. But if among the Greeks, after the edition of the Seventy, when the Gospel of Christ was already shining, the Jew Aquila, and Symmachus and Theodotion, Judaizing heretics, were received, who hid many mysteries of the Saviour by deceitful translation, and yet they are kept in the Hexapla among the churches and are expounded by churchmen: how much more ought I, a Christian, born of Christian parents, and bearing the banner of the cross on my forehead, whose aim was to restore what was omitted, to correct what was corrupted, and to open the mysteries of the church in pure and faithful language, not to be rejected either by fastidious or by malicious readers!"

The Psalter too, which Rome long ago received from our labour, certainly most corrected according to the Seventy translators, I turned again according to the Hebrew and fortified with a preface, and in part of the prologue spoke thus: "Since, then, disputing recently with a Hebrew, you brought forward certain testimonies from the Psalms about the Lord Saviour, and he, wishing to mock you, asserted at almost every word that it was not so in the Hebrew as you objected from the Seventy translators, you most earnestly asked that after Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion I should translate a new edition in the Latin tongue. For you said that you were more troubled by the variety of translators, and that, for the love with which you are carried away, you would be content with either my translation or my judgment. Driven by you, then, to whom I ought not to refuse even what I cannot do, I have again handed myself over to the barking of detractors, and preferred that you should look for my strength rather than my will in friendship. Certainly I will say confidently, and will cite many witnesses of this work, that I have changed nothing, at least knowingly, from the Hebrew truth. Wherever, then, my edition differs from the old ones, ask any of the Hebrews, and you will see clearly that I am torn in vain by rivals, who prefer to seem to despise splendid things rather than to learn them. Most perverse men: for while they always seek new pleasures, and the neighbouring seas do not suffice their gullets, why in the study of the Scriptures alone are they content with the old flavour? Nor do I say this to bite my predecessors, or think anything should be taken from those whose translation, most carefully corrected, I long ago gave to the men of my own tongue: but because it is one thing to read the Psalms in the churches of believers in Christ, another to answer Jews who cavil at every word."

Solomon's books too, which I had once turned into Latin according to the Seventy with obeli and asterisks added, when translating them from the Hebrew and dedicating them to the holy bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, I appended this at the end of my short preface: "If anyone prefers the edition of the Seventy translators, he has it, corrected by us long ago. For we do not forge new things in such a way as to destroy the old."

I will come to Isaiah too, and append part of its prologue on the Seventy translators. When I had said that he should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, because he followed out all the mysteries of the church of Christ so clearly that he would be thought not to prophesy about the future but to weave a history of the past, I added this too: "Hence I conjecture that the Seventy translators did not wish at that time to betray the mysteries of their faith plainly to the heathen, lest they give what is holy to dogs and pearls to swine. When you read this edition, you will notice these things hidden by them. Nor am I unaware how great a labour it is to understand the prophets, and that no one can easily judge of a translation unless he has first understood what he reads; and that we too are exposed to the bites of very many who, goaded by envy, despise what they cannot attain. Knowingly and with open eyes, then, I put my hand into the flame. And nevertheless I beg this of fastidious readers: that as the Greeks after the Seventy translators read Aquila and Symmachus and Theodotion, either for the study of their doctrine or to understand the Seventy better by comparison with them, so these too would at least deign to have one translator after the earlier ones. Let them read first and despise afterwards, lest they seem to condemn what they do not know, not from judgment but from the presumption of hatred."

About Daniel I will answer briefly: I did not deny that he was a prophet, whom at the very front of the prologue I confessed to be a prophet; but I wished to show what the Hebrews say, and by what arguments they try to prove their opinion, and to teach the reader that the churches of Christ read this prophet according to Theodotion, not according to the Seventy translators. If I said that their edition in this book is far from the truth, and rejected by the right judgment of the churches of Christ, it is not the fault of me who said it, but of those who read it. Four editions are at hand, of Aquila, Symmachus, the Seventy, and Theodotion: the churches read Daniel according to Theodotion. What sin did I commit if I followed the judgment of the churches? As for my reporting what the Hebrews usually say against the story of Susanna, and the hymn of the three young men, and the fables of Bel and the Dragon, which are not in the Hebrew volume, he who accuses me proves himself a foolish sycophant. For I explained not what I myself thought but what they usually say against us. If I did not answer their opinion in the prologue, studying brevity lest I seem to write not a preface but a book, I think I added at once; for I said: "Of which this is not the time to discourse." Otherwise, from my asserting that Porphyry said much against this prophet, and calling as witnesses of this Methodius, Eusebius and Apollinaris, who answered his madness in many thousands of lines, he will be able to accuse me of not writing against Porphyry's books in a short preface. Let him who pursues such trifles, and will not receive the truth of the Hebrew Scripture, hear me proclaim freely: no one is forced to read what he does not wish. I wrote for those who asked, not for the fastidious; for the grateful, not the envious; for the studious, not the yawning. And yet I wonder how he reads Theodotion, a heretic and Judaizer, and disdains the translation of a Christian, however much a sinner.

I beg you, sweetest friend, who are so curious as to know even my dreams, and call into accusation everything I wrote over so many years without fear of future slander, to answer how you do not know the prefaces of the books you accuse, which, by a kind of prophecy, answered the future slander, fulfilling the proverb, "The antidote before the poison." What harm does our translation do to the churches? At great expense, as I know, you bought the Jewish translators of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, and the fifth and sixth editions. Your Origen, and (lest you complain that you are struck with figured praise) our Origen (I call him ours for the learning of his genius, not for the truth of his doctrines), in all his books after the Seventy translators explains and expounds the translations of the Jews. Eusebius too and Didymus do the same. I pass over Apollinaris, who with good zeal but not according to knowledge tried to sew patches of everyone's translations into one garment, and to weave the sequence of Scripture not by the rule of truth but by his own judgment. Apostolic men use the Hebrew Scriptures; it is plain that the apostles and evangelists themselves did this. The Lord and Saviour, wherever he mentions the old Scripture, sets down examples from the Hebrew volumes, as in this: "He who believes in me, as the Scripture says, rivers of living water shall flow from his belly." And on the very cross: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani," which is interpreted, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", not as it is put by the Seventy: "God, my God, look on me, why have you forsaken me?" And many things like these. Nor do we say this to discredit the Seventy translators, but because the authority of the apostles and of Christ is greater; and wherever the Seventy do not disagree with the Hebrew, there the apostles took examples from their translation; but where they differ, they set down in Greek what they had learned among the Hebrews. As, then, I show that many things are set down in the New Testament from the old books which are not in the Seventy, and teach that these are written in the Hebrew, so let the accuser show anything written in the New Testament from the Seventy translators which is not in the Hebrew, and the dispute is ended.

From all this it is proved both that the edition of the Seventy translators, which has been confirmed by the long use of readers, is useful to the churches, since the nations hear that Christ will come before he comes; and that the other translators are not to be rejected, since they translated not their own but divine volumes; and that my friend ought to accept from a Christian and a friend what he hastened to have copied for himself at great expense by Jews. I have exceeded the limit of a letter; and I, who had already fixed my pen against an abominable heresy, have been compelled to answer for myself, awaiting my friend's three volumes and hanging with my whole mind on the heap of his charges; except that it is lighter to beware of a professed enemy than to bear a foe hiding under a friend's name.

Having read the letter of your prudence in which you inveigh against me, and now challenge to answer with books the man you once praised, whom you called a true colleague and brother, and terrify him with charges, I understood that the saying of Solomon was fulfilled in you: "In the mouth of a fool is a rod of insult"; and, "A fool does not receive words of prudence, unless you say what is in his heart." And Isaiah: "The fool," he says, "will speak foolish things, and his heart will understand vain things, to fulfil iniquity and speak a lie against God." For what need was there to send volumes of accusation and bring curses into the open, if, in the last part of your letter, by announcing death you frighten me from daring to answer the charges, or rather your praises? For you both proclaim and accuse the same things, and from one spring come sweet and bitter. Therefore I beg you to show first the modesty and shame which you demand of me; and you who accuse another of lying, stop lying yourself. I cause scandal to no one, nor am I in the meantime your accuser. For I do not consider what you deserve, but what befits me; and I dread the word of the Saviour, who says: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it is better for him that a millstone be hung around his neck and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea." And: "Woe to the world because of scandals. For it is necessary that scandals come; but woe to the man through whom the scandal comes." I too could heap falsehoods on you, and say that I had heard or seen what no one notes, so that among the ignorant impudence might be thought truth and fury constancy. But far be it from me to imitate you, and do myself what I censure in you. Let him speak filth who can commit filth. "The evil man out of the evil treasure of the heart brings forth evil things. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." Meanwhile take this gain, that your former friend, now accused, will not cast base things in your teeth. And I say this not because I fear the swords of your accusation, but because I would rather be accused than accuse, and suffer injury than do it, knowing the Apostle's precept: "Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord. But if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink. For in doing this you will heap coals of fire on his head." For he who avenges himself does not merit the Lord's vengeance.

And yet before I answer your letter, I wish to expostulate with you, oldest of monks, good presbyter, imitator of Christ: can you kill your brother, whom, if you only hate him, you are a murderer? Did you learn this from the Saviour, to offer the other cheek to one who strikes it? So he himself answered the one who struck him: "If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; if well, why do you strike me?" You threaten death, which even serpents can inflict. Death is for all; murder is for the worst. What then? Unless you kill me, shall I be immortal? Rather, I am grateful that you make a virtue of necessity. Did not the apostles too disagree among themselves, their friendship intact, when Paul and Barnabas were provoked on account of John, surnamed Mark, and a voyage separated those whom the Gospel of Christ will unite? Did not the same Paul withstand Cephas to his face, because he did not walk with a straight foot in the Gospel? And yet he calls him his predecessor and a pillar of the church, and sets out his preaching with him, lest he should run or have run in vain. Do not even children disagree with parents in religion, and wives with husbands, with piety intact? If you hold as we hold, why do you hate us? If you believe otherwise, why do you wish to kill? Is anyone who disagrees with you to be killed? I call Jesus as witness of my conscience, who is to judge both this letter and yours, that at the admonition of the holy Pope Chromatius I wished to keep silent, to put an end to quarrels, and to overcome evil with good; but since you threaten destruction unless I keep silent, I am compelled to answer, lest by keeping silent I seem to admit the charge, and you interpret my gentleness as the sign of a bad conscience.

This is your true dilemma, brought out not from the art of dialectic, which you do not know, but from the workshop and meditation of executioners: if I keep silent, I shall be guilty; if I answer, a reviler. So you both forbid me and force me to answer. In this I will moderate both, so as to wash away the charges and refrain from injury. For who would not fear one who is ready to kill? And I will follow the steps of your proposition, keeping the rest for those most learned books, which I refuted before I had read them. You say "that you sent your accusation of me only to those who had been hurt by my words, and not to more: because Christians must speak not for display but for edification." And whence, I beg you, did the report of your books reach me? Who spread them at Rome, who in Italy, who through the islands of Dalmatia? If they lay hidden in your book chests and your friends', how did my crimes reach me? And do you dare to say that you speak as a Christian not for display but for edification, you an old man who invent about an old man such things as a murderer would not say of a thief, a harlot of a whore, a buffoon of a mime? who bring forth mountains of charges against me, and sharpen so long beforehand the swords you are to drive into my throat? Was it for this that your Cereales and couriers ran through different provinces, to read my praises? to recite your panegyric through corners and streets and the weaving rooms of little women? This is that holy modesty of yours, this Christian edification; you are so modest, so bashful, that people coming in crowds from the West told me your curses, so accurately from memory and so consistently that I was forced to answer not your writings, which I had not yet read, but the opinions of your writings, and to catch on the shield of truth the darts of falsehood flying through the whole world.

There follows in your letter: "Do not buy my secretary with much gold, as your friends did with my sheets of Peri Archon, not yet corrected, not yet finished clean, so that they could more easily falsify what either no one had or very few. Receive free, sent by me, the manuscript which you would wish to have bought at a great price." Are you not ashamed of this opening? I buy your secretary with gold? And who is so great a man as to dare to compete in wealth with Croesus and Darius, as not to fear a sudden Demaratus and Crassus? Have you so hardened your brow as to make a lie your hope, and think you can be protected by a lie, and that whatever you invent must be believed? Who stole from the room of brother Eusebius at Bethlehem the letter praising you? By whose contrivance, and by whose servants, was a manuscript found in the hospice of the holy Fabiola, and of Oceanus, a Christian and prudent man, which they had never seen? Do you think yourself innocent if you shift onto others whatever is yours? Whoever offends you, however simple, however harmless, will at once become guilty? For you have that by which Danae's chastity was overcome, which Gehazi preferred to his master's holiness, for which Judas betrayed his Lord.

"Let us see, however, what my close friend falsified in your sheets, not yet corrected and not yet finished clean; and that they were the more easily falsified by him because either no one had them or very few." I wrote before, and now protest the same with God hearing, that I did not approve his accusation, nor that of any Christian against a Christian. For what need is there to bring out, to the scandal and ruin of many, what you can either reprove or correct in secret? But since each one lives by his own stomach, and a friend is not at once the master of another's will, as I censure even a true accusation, so I do not accept falsification of the sheets in a holy man. For what could a Latin change in a Greek translation? Or what could he take away or add in the books Peri Archon, where everything is so woven together, and one thing hangs on another, that whatever you wish to take away or add would at once show like a patch in a garment? What, then, you warn me of, do yourself: take on at least a little human, if not Christian, shame, lest, with your conscience despised and trampled, you think yourself cleared by words when you are pressed by facts. If Eusebius bought uncorrected sheets with gold in order to falsify them, bring out yours, which are not falsified; and if you prove there is nothing heretical in them, then he will be held guilty of the crime of falsification. However much you change, however much you correct, you will not prove them catholic. For if the error were in words, or in a few meanings, the evil could be cut off and good put in its place. But where the whole discussion is consistent, that all rational creatures, which fell by their own will, return afterwards into one state, so that from the same beginning there are again other falls, what have you to correct unless you change everything? And if you wish to do this, you will no longer translate another's books, but compose your own. But what kind of argument this is I do not understand: "Because," he says, "the sheets were uncorrected and not yet finished clean, they were more easily falsified by Eusebius." Either I am too slow, or it seems to me foolish and dull enough. If the sheets were not yet corrected nor finished clean, their error will be imputed not to Eusebius but to your delay and slowness, who ceased to correct them. And he will be blameworthy only in this, that he quickly spread among the people your writings, which you had decided to correct little by little. But if, as you will have it, Eusebius falsified them, why do you complain and plead that they burst into public uncorrected and not yet finished clean? For corrected and uncorrected alike admit falsification. "No one," you say, "had those books, or very few." How much inconsistency in one sentence! If no one had them, how were they with a few? If a few had them, why do you lie that no one had them? And since you say they were with a few, and by your own confession it is overturned that no one had them, where is what you complain of, your secretary bought with gold? Tell the secretary's name, how much gold was given, where, through whom, or to whom it was given. Surely you have cast your betrayer from you, and separated one guilty of so great a crime from your company. See whether it is not truer that copies were given by those few friends of yours to Eusebius and the others, which so agree and harmonize with one another that they do not differ from each other by a single point. Next, what prudence is it to give others a copy which you had not yet corrected? The sheets were not written clean, and others already possessed your errors to be corrected. Do you perceive that the lie does not hang together? And what did it profit you at a critical moment, to escape the bishops' judgments, to be exposed to examination and refuted by your own words? From which it appears, according to the saying of the illustrious orator (Cicero), that you have the will to lie but not the art of inventing.

I will follow the order of the letter and append the very words, as you spoke them. "I confess that I praised your eloquence, as you say, in my preface too; and I would praise it even now, if you did not make it odious, against the opinion of your Tully, by much boasting." Where did I boast of my eloquence, I who did not gladly accept it even when praised by you? Or do you say this because I do not wish to be stroked by deceitful proclamation? You will be openly accused, so that you who spit out the praiser may feel the accuser. Your lack of skill I was not so foolish as to censure, since no one can accuse it more strongly than you yourself when you write. But I wished to show your fellow pupils, who did not learn letters with you, what progress you made in thirty years in the East: you who, an illiterate writer, think impudence eloquence, and cursing everyone a sign of good conscience. Nor, as you say, do I apply the ferule to you, nor do I strive to teach letters to my old pupil with the strap and blows; but since we writers cannot bear the thunderbolt of your eloquence and learning, and you dazzle our eyes with the sharpness of your genius, so much that you think all envious of you, we vie with one another in wishing to crush you, lest, if you once hold the first place in writing and stand on the citadel of eloquence, none of us who wish to know something may be allowed to mutter. I am a philosopher, rhetor, grammarian, dialectician, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, trilingual. In this way you too will be bilingual, who have such knowledge of Greek and Latin speech that the Greeks think you a Latin and the Latins think you a Greek; and Pope Epiphanius pentaglossos, because he speaks against you and your beloved (Origen) in five languages. And at the same time I wonder at the rashness with which you dare to say against a man of such great arts: "You who watch with the eyes of so many disciplines, how are you to be pardoned if you err, and not covered with perpetual silence of shame?" When I read this, and thought I had slipped somewhere in speech ("for whoever does not sin in word is a perfect man"), and suspected that he was about to bring out some of my faults, he suddenly added: "Two days before the bearer of this left, what you declaimed against me came into my hands." Where then is what you threaten, saying, "How are you to be pardoned if you err, and not covered with perpetual silence of shame?" Unless perhaps, for shortness of time, you could not arrange them in order, or you were going to hire one of the learned to search my works for the jewels of your eloquence. Above you wrote: "Receive free, sent by me, the manuscript which you would wish to have bought (comparatum) at a great price," and now you speak with tricks of humility: "I wished to imitate you; but since the one returning to you was in a hurry, I preferred to write briefly to you rather than at length to others about your curses." And meanwhile you boldly enjoy your lack of skill. For you confessed once for all, saying: "Your censure in a few things was superfluous, when it is professed by us in all." Nor will I censure that you put "comparatum" for "bought," since comparatio is of equals, emptio the counting out of a price; and "since the one returning to you was in a hurry," a pleonasm of the most sordid expression. I will answer only the meanings, and will convict you not of being a solecist and barbarian, but a liar, deceitful and shameless.

If you write a letter to me only to warn me and wish me corrected, lest I cause scandal to the rest, and while some rage others be slain, why do you write books against me to others, and spread them through the whole world by your satellites to be read? Where is your syllogism, with which you try to entangle me, and say: "Whom did you wish to correct in this, best of masters? If those to whom you write, they had done no wrong; if me whom you censure, you had not written to me." And I will answer you with your own words: Whom did you wish to correct, unlearned master? Those who had not sinned? Or me, to whom you had not written? You think readers brutes, and that no one understands your prudence, or rather malice, by which the serpent too was more prudent than all the beasts in paradise: that you demand a secret admonition from me, whom you pursue with a public accusation; and are you not ashamed to call your accusation an Apology? And you complain that I set a shield against your dagger, and, as a little religious and little holy man, put on a mask of humility and say: "If I had erred, why do you write to others and not refute me myself?" This very thing I will turn back on you: whatever you complain that I did not do, why did you not do it yourself? As if someone, beating another with fists and heels, should say to him, if he wished to resist: "Was it not commanded you, 'To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also'?" What then, good man, were you commanded to beat me, to dig out my eye, and if I move a little, will you sing me the precepts of the Gospel? Do you want to know all the tricks of your quibbles, and the snares of the little foxes that live in the ruins, of whom Ezekiel speaks: "Like foxes in the desert are your prophets, Israel"? Listen to what you did. You so praised me in your preface that your praises were objected against me, and unless I had said I was a stranger to so great a praiser, I would have been judged a heretic. After I repelled the charges, that is, your praises, and without odium to your name answered the charges, not the accuser, and, defamed by you, inveighed against heretics to prove myself catholic, you are angry, you rage, and forge most brilliant books against me; and when you had handed them to everyone to be read and recited, letters came to me in rivalry from Italy and the city of Rome and Dalmatia, telling with what proclamations my former praiser had adorned me.

I confess, I answered the charges at once, and tried with all my strength to prove that I am not a heretic. And I sent these very books of my Apology to those whom you had wounded, so that our antidote might follow your poisons. For this fault you send me both the earlier books and a recent letter, full of injuries and charges. What do you want me to do, good friend? Keep silent? I will seem to admit the charge. Speak? You terrify me with your swords and threaten an accusation no longer ecclesiastical but before the tribunals. What did I do? What did I deserve? In what did I hurt you? Because I denied that I am a heretic? Because I judged myself unworthy of your praises? Because I described in plain speech the frauds and perjuries of heretics? What is that to you, who boast that you are catholic and truthful, who would rather accuse me than defend yourself? Is my defence your accusation? Or can you not be orthodox otherwise than by proving me a heretic? What good to you is my company? Or what prudence is this? Accused by others, you accuse another. You are attacked by one, and, turning your back on him, you provoke against you one who is at rest.

I call Jesus the mediator to witness that I come down to these words unwillingly and resisting, and that unless you provoked me I would always have kept silent. In short, stop accusing, and I will stop defending. For what edification is it to the hearers that two old men fight each other over heretics, especially when both wish to seem catholics? Let us drop the patronage of heretics, and there will be no contention between us. With the same fervour with which we formerly praised Origen, let us now condemn him, condemned by the whole world. Let us join right hands, unite our minds, and follow with eager step the two leaders of East and West (Theophilus and Anastasius). We erred as young men; let us be corrected as old men. If you are a brother, rejoice that I have been corrected. If I am a friend, I ought to congratulate you on your conversion. As long as there is a quarrel between us, we shall seem to hold the right faith from necessity, not from will. Our enmities take away from each of us the testimony of true repentance. If we believe one thing, if we will and do not will the same things (from which, as even Catiline testifies, firm friendships are born), if we hate heretics alike and condemn the old error equally, why do we strain against each other, when we attack the same things and defend the same things? Forgive me that in youth I praised Origen's learning and zeal for the Scriptures before I knew his heresy fully; and I will pardon you for having written an Apology for his books with a grey head.

You testify that my little books came into your hands two days before you wrote your letter to us, and that therefore you did not have time to answer at leisure; otherwise, if you had spoken against us after meditating and preparing, you would seem to hurl thunderbolts, not charges. And who will believe you, a most truthful man, that a merchant in Eastern wares, who had to sell what he had brought from here and to buy there what he would carry back here, was only two days at Aquileia, so that you were forced to dictate a letter against us hurriedly and on the spot? For your books, which you polished for three years, are more eloquent. Unless perhaps there was no one present then to correct your trifles, and that is why the whole road of your speech, without the art of Pallas, is cut up by the rough places and chasms of faults. The lie about the time is so open that you could not, I do not say answer, but read my writings in two days. From which it appears that you either wrote that letter over several days, as the elegance of the style itself proves; or, if it is a hasty dictation, you are certainly negligent, since, being so good extempore, you are worse when you have meditated.

As to your shuffling and saying that you translated from the Greek what I had previously translated into Latin, I do not well understand what you mean; unless perhaps you are still accusing the commentaries on Ephesians, and, as if nothing had been answered you on this, harden the impudence of your brow, and with ears stopped do not receive the voices of the charmer. In the commentaries, those and others, we set out both our own view and that of others, openly confessing what is heretical and what catholic. For this is the custom of commentaries and the rule of expositors, that they follow various opinions in exposition and set out what seems right either to themselves or to others. And this is done not only by interpreters of the holy Scriptures but also by expositors of secular letters, both of the Latin tongue and of the Greek. You cannot plead this in the books Peri Archon. For your little preface will convict you, in which you promise that, the bad things being cut off, and what had been added by heretics, the best remained; so that whatever good or bad you said there is no longer imputed to him whom you translate, but to you who translated it; unless perhaps you were bound to correct the heretics' errors and bring Origen's evils into the open. But on this, since you send us back to the manuscript, we answered you before we read your writings.

About Pamphilus's book, a thing not ridiculous, as you write, but perhaps laughable happened to me: that after asserting it was Eusebius's, not Pamphilus's, I said at the end that I too had for many years thought it was Pamphilus's, and had borrowed a copy of this volume from you. See how much I fear your guffaws, that I even now press the same things. We received a copy from your manuscript as if Pamphilus's. I believed a Christian, I believed a monk: I did not think such a crime could be invented by you. But afterwards, when the question against Origen had been stirred up throughout the world by your translation, I was more careful in seeking copies, and in the library of Caesarea I found Eusebius's six volumes of the Apology for Origen. When I had read them, I detected the first book, which you alone published under the martyr's name, with most of the blasphemies about the Son and the Holy Spirit changed for the better. And whether Didymus did this, or you, or someone else, I do not know; but you are most plainly convicted of having done it in the books Peri Archon: especially since the same Eusebius, as I have already taught in the two (former) books, writes that Pamphilus published no work of his own. Tell us too, then, from whom you received the copy, and do not, to escape the charge, name some dead men: if you cannot show the author, produce someone who cannot answer. But if that rivulet has its spring in your book chests, you do not doubt what follows, even if I keep silent. But suppose the title of this book and the author's name were changed by some other lover of Origen: why do you turn this into the Latin tongue? Plainly so that by the testimony of a martyr all might believe Origen's writings, with the defence of so great an author and witness set in front. Nor is the Apology of a most learned man enough for you, unless you write a volume of your own too in his defence; and when these have been spread among many, you safely turn the books Peri Archon from the Greek, and commend them with a preface, saying that some things in them had been corrupted by heretics, which you corrected from reading Origen's other books. You praise me too, so that none of my friends may contradict you. You proclaim me Origen's herald, raise my eloquence to heaven, so as to sink my faith into the mire; you call me brother and colleague, and confess yourself an imitator of my work. And while you boast of the seventy homilies of Origen translated by me, and some tomes on the Apostle, in which I so polished everything "that the Latin reader will find nothing in them at variance with the catholic faith," now you accuse those same books as heretical; and, turning your pen, you accuse him whom you had proclaimed, because you thought him a partner, since you see him an enemy of your perfidy. Which of the two is the slanderer of the martyr? I, who say that he was not a heretic and did not write the book which all censure? Or you, who published, with the title changed, the volume of an Arian under the name of a martyr? Is the scandal of Greece not enough for you, unless you press it on the ears of the Latins too, and disfigure the illustrious martyr, as far as in you lies, by your translation? You indeed did it with another intention, not to accuse me, but to defend Origen's writings through us. But know that the Roman faith, praised by the apostolic voice, does not receive such tricks; even if an angel announce otherwise than was once preached, fortified by Paul's authority it cannot be changed. Therefore, brother, whether the book was falsified by you, as many think, or by another, as perhaps you will try to persuade, and you rashly believed the treatise of a heretic to be the martyr's, change the title, and free Roman simplicity from so great a danger. It is not expedient for you that through you a most illustrious martyr be judged a heretic; that he who shed his blood for Christ be proved contrary to the faith of Christ. Say rather, "I found a book, I thought it the martyr's": do not fear repentance. I will not press you, nor ask from whom you received it: either name some dead man, or say you bought it in the street from an unknown man. For we seek not your condemnation but your conversion. It is better that you erred than that the martyr was a heretic. Meanwhile, from the present fetter, pull out your foot somehow. At the future judgment you must see what you answer to the martyr's complaints against you.

You also put to yourself what no one objects, and wash away what no one accuses. For you say that you read in my letter: "Tell me, who allowed you, in translating, to take some things away, change some, add some?" And at once you answer yourself and speak against me: "I say to you: who, I pray, allowed you in your commentaries to write some things from Origen, some from Apollinaris, some from yourself, and not all from Origen, or from yourself, or from another?" Meanwhile, while aiming at something else, you have betrayed a very strong charge against yourself, and have forgotten the old proverb: liars should have good memories. For you say that in my commentaries I set down some things from Origen, some from Apollinaris, some from myself. If, then, what I set down under others' names belongs to Apollinaris and Origen, how is it that in your books you charge me with the crime that when I write, "Another says this; Someone supposes so," that "another" and "someone" is I? Between Apollinaris and Didymus there is great difference of exposition, style and doctrine. When I set down different opinions in one chapter, am I to be believed to follow contrary meanings? But of this elsewhere.

Now I ask you who objected to you why you took away, added, or changed things in Origen, and questioned you as if hung on the rack: are what you translated good or bad? In vain you feign innocence, so as to weaken the true inquiry by a foolish question. I did not accuse you of translating Origen as you pleased; for I myself did this, and before me Victorinus, Hilary and Ambrose did it; but of strengthening a heretical translation with the testimony of your preface. You force me to repeat the same things again, and to go back over my own lines. For you say in that same prologue that you cut away what had been added by heretics and put good things in their place. If you took away the heretics' evils, then what you left or added will be either Origen's or yours, which you certainly set down as good. But you will not be able to deny that there are many evils in them. "What is that to me?" you will say; "impute it to Origen; for I changed only what had been added by heretics." Set out the reasons why you took away the heretics' evils and left Origen's intact. Is it not plain that you condemned Origen's evils in part under the name of heretics, and in part accepted them, because you judged them not evil but good and of your own faith? These are what I asked about, whether they were good or bad, which you praised in your preface, which you confessed remained as best after the worst were cut away; and I hung you on the rack of true argument, so that if you say "good," you are proved a heretic; if "bad," you at once hear: "Why then did you praise in your preface what is bad?" And I did not add what you craftily pretend: "Why did you translate bad things for the Latins to know?" For to show evil things is sometimes not the act of one teaching but of one forbidding: that the reader may beware, not follow the errors; that he may despise when known what, unknown, is sometimes a marvel. And after this you dare to say that I am the author of such writings, while you, as translator, did more than a translator in what you could correct, and in what you could not were only a translator. You would rightly say this if your books Peri Archon did not have a little preface. This Hilary too did in translating his homilies, so that both good and bad were imputed not to the translator but to their author. If you had not said that you cut away the worst and left the best, you might somehow escape from the mud. This is what destroys the tricks of your little genius and does not let you escape, bound on both sides. Do not abuse the simplicity of the reader so much, and think all who will read your writing such brutes as not to laugh when you let the wounds rot and put plasters on a healthy body.

What you think about the resurrection of the flesh we have already learned in your Apology: "No member cut off, nor any part of the body removed." This is the pure and open confession of your simplicity, which you assert has been accepted by all the bishops of Italy. I would believe you, if that book, not Pamphilus's, did not make me doubt about you. And yet I wonder how Italy approved what Rome despised; how bishops accepted what the apostolic see condemned.

You also write that I indicated by letter that Pope Theophilus had recently published an exposition of faith, which has not yet reached you; and you promise that whatever he writes you will follow. I do not know that I wrote this, or ever sent letters of this kind. But you consent to uncertain things, and to things whose nature you do not know, so as to decline certain ones and not be held to assent to them. Two of his letters, the synodal and the paschal, against Origen and his disciples, and others against Apollinaris and the same Origen, I have translated within about these two years, and have given them to the men of our tongue to read for the building up of the church. I do not know that I have translated any other of his works. And yet you, who say you follow Pope Theophilus's judgment in everything, beware lest your masters and fellow pupils hear this, and you offend very many who call me a robber and you a martyr; lest he be angry with you who, sending letters to you against Pope Epiphanius, urged you to remain in the truth of the faith and not change your opinion for any terror. That letter in his own hand is held by those to whom it was brought. And after this you speak in your fashion: "So that I may satisfy you even raging, as you said above: now say, what do you think? Have you anything more on which to stretch the sinews of your talkativeness?" And are you indignant if I accuse you of speaking tastelessly, when you, a church writer, take up the indecencies of comedies and the sport of harlots and lovers?

Further, as to your asking when I began to follow Pope Theophilus's judgment and was joined to him in the communion of faith, and answering yourself: "Then, I believe, when you were defending with the utmost effort and all zeal Paul, whom he had condemned; when you were urging him to recover by an imperial rescript the priesthood which he had lost by episcopal judgment." I will not answer for myself before speaking of the injuries to others. What humanity, what clemency is it to insult others' miseries and to show everyone another's wounds? Did that Samaritan teach you this way, to carry back the half-dead man to the inn, to pour oil into the wounds, to promise the innkeeper a fee? Is this how the sheep brought back, the drachma found, the prodigal son were received? Suppose I had hurt you, and provoked you, as you say, with certain goads to the madness of curses: what did a man in hiding deserve, that you should lay bare his scar, and tear open the healed skin with unexpected pain? Even if he deserved insults, ought you not to refrain? Either I am mistaken, or what very many say is true, that in him you are persecuting the enemies of the Origenists, and, on the pretext of one, raging against both. If you delight in Pope Theophilus's judgments, and think it wicked to overturn the decrees of pontiffs, what do you say of the others whom he himself condemned? What of Pope Anastasius, of whom no one, you say, thinks it true that the priest of so great a city could do an injury to you, innocent or absent? Nor do I say this as judging bishops' judgments, or wishing their decrees rescinded; but that each does at his own risk what seems right to him, and he himself will know how he is to be judged for his judgment. In our monastery hospitality is dear to our heart, and we receive all who come to us with the glad face of humanity. For we fear lest Mary with Joseph find no place in the inn, lest Jesus, shut out, say to us: "I was a stranger, and you did not take me in." Only heretics we do not receive, whom alone you receive. For our purpose is to wash the feet of those who come, not to discuss their merits. Remember, brother, his confession, and the breast which the scourges cut. Remember the prison, the darkness, the exile, the mines, and you will not be indignant that one passing through was received as a guest. Or do we seem to you rebels because we offer a cup of cold water in Christ's name to the thirsty?

Do you want to know why we should love him more and you should hate him more? The faction of heretics recently driven from Egypt and Alexandria betook itself to Jerusalem and wished to be joined to him, so that those whose pain was one might make one accusation. He repelled, despised and cast them off, saying that he was not an enemy of the faith, nor waging war against the church; that what he had attempted before came from pain, not from faithlessness; that he had not sought to attack another's innocence but to prove his own. Do you think an imperial rescript after the judgments of priests impious? What kind it is, he who obtained it knows. What do you think of those who, though condemned, besiege the palace, and, forming a wedge, persecute the faith of Christ in one man? Of my communion and Pope Theophilus's I will call no other witness than the very man you pretend I have hurt, whose letters, always given to me, you know of even at the time when you prevented their being delivered to me, and, sending couriers daily, boasted that his enemy was our friend and most intimate, and lied what you now shamelessly write, to stir up his hatred against us, so that the pain of injury might become the oppression of faith. But a prudent man of apostolic wisdom proved by time and events both our mind toward him and your plots against us. If my disciples, as you write, stirred up plots against you at Rome and stole your uncorrected sheets while you slept, who roused Pope Theophilus against the rebels in Egypt? Who the decrees of kings? Who the agreement of the world in this matter? And you boast that from youth you were a hearer and disciple of Theophilus, though he, before he became bishop, never taught, because of his inborn humility, and you, after he became bishop here, were not at Alexandria. And you dare to say, to disparage me: "I neither accuse nor change my masters." If this is true, you make your way of life suspect to me. For I do not condemn my teachers, as you charge, but fear that word of Isaiah: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who call bitter sweet and sweet bitter!" But you, while you drink alike the honeyed wine and the poisons of your masters, have departed from the apostle-master, who teaches that even an angel and himself are not to be followed if they err in faith.

What you dream about the name of Vigilantius I do not know. For where did I write that he was stained by heretical communion at Alexandria? Give the book, produce the letter: you will find it nowhere at all; and with the same licence, or rather impudence, of lying, by which you think everyone will believe your words, you add: "When you set down a testimony of the Scriptures against him so insultingly that I do not dare to repeat it with my mouth." You do not dare to repeat it, who by keeping silent accuse more. And since you have nothing to object, you feign modesty, so that the reader may think you spare me, who in lying have not spared your own soul. What is that testimony of the Scriptures which may not come out of that most modest mouth of yours? Or what can be mentioned in the holy books that is base? If you blush to speak it, at least write it, so that your own speech may convict us of impudence. To say nothing of the rest, from this one chapter I will prove that you possess an iron brow of deceit. See how much I fear your accusation. If you produce what you threaten, all that is yours will be mine. I answered you in Vigilantius. For he accused the same things which you afterwards as a friend praise and as an enemy accuse. I know by whom his rage against me was stirred up; I know your burrowings. The simplicity which all proclaim I am not unaware of. Through his folly your malice raged against me; and if I repelled it with my letter, so that you might not seem the only one to have a staff of letters, you ought not to pretend a baseness of words which you have nowhere read at all, but understand and confess that through his madness your slanders were answered.

On the letter of the holy Pope Anastasius you have proved slippery, and, confused, you find nowhere to plant your foot. For now you say it was composed by me, now that it ought to have been sent to you by him to whom it was sent. Again you accuse the writer of injustice; you testify that whether it was written by him or not, it has nothing to do with you, since you have the testimony of his predecessor, and, when Rome asked you to illustrate it with your presence, you despised it for love of your little town. If you suspect that the letter was forged by me, why do you not look for it in the archive of the Roman church, so that, when you have discovered it was not given by the bishop, you may hold me guilty of a most manifest crime, and bind me not with spider's webs but with a very strong and solid net? But if it is the Roman bishop's, you act foolishly in asking a copy of the letter from him to whom it was not sent, and not from him who sent it, and in waiting for testimony from the East, whose author and witness you have nearby. Go rather to Rome, and in person expostulate with him why he insulted you, absent and innocent. First, that he did not receive the exposition of your faith, which, as you write, all Italy approved, and would not use the staff of your letters against your dogs. Next, that he sent letters against you to the East, and branded you, without your knowing, with the cautery of heresy, and said that Origen's books Peri Archon were translated by you and handed to the simple Roman church, so that they might lose through you the truth of the faith which they had learned from the Apostle; and, to cause you greater odium, dared to accuse them as strengthened by the testimony of your preface. It is no light thing which the pontiff of so great a city charges against you, or rashly accepted when objected by another. Shout and cry through the crossroads and streets: "It is not my book; and if it is mine, Eusebius stole the uncorrected sheets. I published it otherwise; or rather I did not publish it. I gave them to no one, or certainly to few; and the enemy was so wicked and the friends so negligent that the copies of all were falsified by him alike." This, dearest brother, you ought to have done, and not, turning your back on him, direct at me the overseas stuffing of your curses. For what good is it to your wounds if I am wounded? Or is it a comfort to one struck to see a friend dying with him?

You bring forward the letter of Siricius, who is now asleep in the Lord, and despise the words of the living Anastasius. "For what harm can it do you," as you say, "what he wrote, or perhaps did not write, without your knowing? And if he wrote it, the testimony of the whole world suffices for you, that no one thinks it true that the priest of so great a city could have done injury to one innocent or absent." You call yourself innocent, at whose translation Rome trembled; absent, who, accused, do not dare to answer. And you so flee the judgment of the city of Rome that you would rather endure a barbarian siege than the sentence of a city at peace. Suppose I forged last year's letter. Who sent the recent writings to the East, in which Pope Anastasius adorns you with such flowers that, when you read them, you will begin to want to defend yourself rather than accuse us? And at the same time consider that inimitable prudence of yours, and your Attic salt, and the charm of your holy eloquence. You are attacked by others, pierced by others' accusation, and you hurl yourself furiously against me and say: "Could I not also tell how you left the City? what judgment was passed on you then? what was written afterwards, what you swore? where you boarded ship? how holily you avoided perjury? I could disclose it, but I have resolved to keep more than to tell." These are the ornaments of your words. And after this, if I say anything harsh against you, at once you threaten me with proscription and swords. And meanwhile, a most eloquent man, you play with rhetorical art and pretend to pass over what you say, so that what you could not prove you make criminal by seeming to omit it. This is all your simplicity: so you spare a friend, and reserve yourself for the judges' tribunals, so that while sparing you have thrown a heap of charges at me.

Do you want to know the order of my departure from the City? I will tell it briefly. In the month of August, with the etesian winds blowing, with the holy presbyter Vincent, and my young brother, and other monks who now live at Jerusalem, I boarded a ship in the port of Rome without fear, a great crowd of saints escorting me. I came to Rhegium, stood a little on the Scyllaean shore, where I learned the old fables, and the headlong course of crafty Ulysses, and the songs of the Sirens, and the insatiable gulf of Charybdis. And when the inhabitants of that place told me many things and advised me to sail not to the pillars of Proteus but to the port of Jonah (for the former is the course of fugitives and the troubled, the latter of a man secure), I preferred to go by Malea and the Cyclades to Cyprus. There, received by the venerable bishop Epiphanius, of whose testimony you boast, I came to Antioch, where I enjoyed the communion of the pontiff and confessor Paulinus; and escorted by him, in the middle of winter and in very severe cold, I entered Jerusalem. I saw many wonders, and what report had brought me before I verified by the judgment of my eyes. Thence I hastened to Egypt, went round the monasteries of Nitria, and perceived asps lurking among the choirs of saints. At once with quick step I returned to my Bethlehem, where I smelled the manger and cradle of the Saviour. I saw also the most famous lake; nor did I give myself to idle leisure, but learned many things which I did not know before. But as to what judgment was passed on me at Rome and what was written afterwards, I do not want you to keep silent, especially since you have the testimony of writings, and I am to be convicted not by your words, which you can feign and bandy with unpunished lying, but by church writings. See how much I fear you. If you produce even a small scrap against me from the Roman bishop or another church, I will confess all that is written against you as my own crimes. Could I not also discuss your departure? at what age you sailed, whence, at what time? where you lived? whom you were with? But far be it from me to do what I censure in you, and to put together in a church dispute the ravings of old women's quarrels. Let it suffice to have said this alone to your prudence: beware of saying against another whatever can at once be turned back on you.

About the name of holy Epiphanius your evasion is wonderful: that after the kiss, after prayer, you deny he could have written against you; as if you were to contend that he could not die who a little before had lived, or as if your reproof were more certain than excommunication after peace. "They went out from us," it says, "but they were not of us: for they would have remained with us." The Apostle commands that a heretic be avoided after one and a second admonition: who certainly, before he is avoided and condemned, was part of the church's flock. At the same time I cannot keep from laughing that, warned by some prudent person, you sound the praises of Epiphanius: "This is that crazy old man, this the anthropomorphite; this is he who chanted, in your presence, Origen's six thousand books; who thinks preaching against Origen enjoined on him in the languages of all nations; who forbids him to be read lest others learn his thefts." Read your writings, and his letter, or rather letters, from which I will produce one testimony to your faith, so that he may seem not undeservedly praised by you now: "But you, brother, may God free, and the holy people of Christ entrusted to you, and all the brothers who are with you, and especially the presbyter Rufinus, from the heresy of Origen and other heresies and their perdition. For if for one word or two contrary to the faith many heresies have been rejected by the church, how much more will he be among the heretics who invented such perversities and such evil doctrines against the faith, and stood forth as an enemy of the church of God!" This is the holy man's testimony about you: so adorned, so praised by him you walk. This is the letter which you brought out from brother Eusebius's room with gold coins, in order to slander the translator, and hold me guilty of a most open crime for having translated "dearest" for "honourable." But what is it to you, who govern everything by prudent counsel, and walk in the middle so that, if you find people to believe you, neither Anastasius nor Epiphanius wrote against you; but if the letters themselves cry out and break the boldness of your brow, at once you despise the judgment of both, and it has nothing to do with you whether they wrote or did not write, because they could not write about one innocent and absent? "Nor are these evils to be ascribed to a holy man, so as to show that he gave peace with mouth and kiss, but kept evil and guile in his heart." For so you argue, and these are the words of your defence. That the letter against you is his, the world knows, and we prove that it came authentic into your hands: and I wonder with what shame, or rather what shamelessness, you deny what you do not doubt is true. Then Epiphanius will be defiled, who gave you peace and kept guile in his heart? Why should not this be truer, that he first warned you, that he wished to correct you and bring you back to the right road, so that he did not refuse the kiss of Judas, so that he might break the betrayer of the faith by patience; and after he understood that he sweated in vain labour, and that the leopard does not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, he indicated by letter what he had conceived in his mind?

You argue something similar against Pope Anastasius too: that because you have the letter of Bishop Siricius, he could not write against you. I fear lest you suspect an injury done to you. I do not know how, sharp and prudent, you roll down into these absurdities, so that while you think readers foolish you show yourself foolish. After your excellent argument you put in the conclusion: "Far be this from holy men! Such things usually come from your school. You gave us peace as we set out, and threw poisoned darts at our back." And in this same prudence, or rather declamation, you wished to be eloquent. We gave peace; we did not accept heresy. We joined right hands; we escorted you as you left, so that you might be catholics, not so that we might be heretics. Yet I want to know what those poisoned darts are which you complain we threw behind your back. Vincent, Paulinian, Eusebius, Rufinus, presbyters: of whom Vincent came to Rome long before you; Paulinian and Eusebius set out a year after your voyage; Rufinus was sent two years later in the case of Claudius; all either on family business or for another's danger to life. Could we know that, as you entered Rome, a noble man would dream of a ship full of goods entering with swelling sails? that a not foolish interpretation would solve all questions against Fate? that you would translate Eusebius's book for Pamphilus's? that you would put your own as a lid on a poisoned dish? that you would translate the most famous work Peri Archon with the majesty of your eloquence? A new kind of slander: we sent accusers before you committed what was to be accused. It was not, it was not, I say, our design, but God's providence, that men sent for another purpose should fight against a heresy being born, and, like Joseph, relieve a coming famine by the ardour of faith.

Where will daring, once unbridled, not break out? He has objected to himself another's crime, so that we may seem to have invented it. What was said without a name he takes as said against himself, and, clearing away others' sins, he is secure only about his own innocence. For he swears that he did not write the letter to the Africans under my name, in which I confess that I was led on by the Jews to translate lies; and he sends books containing all the same things which he swears he did not know. And I wonder how his prudence agreed with another's wickedness, so that what another lied in Africa this man should say in agreement as true, and some unskilled person could imitate the elegance of his style. You alone may translate the poisons of heretics and give all nations to drink from the cup of Babylon. You will correct the Latin Scriptures from the Greek, and hand the churches something to read other than what they once received from the apostles: and may I not, after the edition of the Seventy, which, most carefully corrected, I gave to the men of my own tongue many years ago, translate for the refutation of the Jews the very copies which they themselves confess to be most true, so that if Christians ever have a dispute against them, they may have no byways of escape, but be struck chiefly with their own sword? I remember that I wrote more fully on this both in many other places and at the end of the second book, where I answered your accusation; and I checked by plain reasoning your popularity-seeking, by which you try to stir up odium against me among the simple and unskilled; and I think the reader should be sent there.

This I will not let pass untouched, lest you grieve that the falsifier of your sheets has the glory of a confessor with me, while you, guilty of the same crime, after your Alexandrian exile and dark prisons, are named martyr and apostle by all the followers of Origen. To the excuse of your unskilfulness I have already answered. But since you repeat the same things, and, as if forgetting your former defence, again warn us that we should know that, having devoured Greek volumes for thirty years, you do not know Latin: attend a little; I censure not a few of your words, otherwise all your writing would have to be erased; but I wished to show your disciples, whom with great zeal you have taught to know nothing, so that they might understand what modesty it is to teach what you do not know, to write what you are ignorant of, and might look for the same wisdom of the master in the meanings too. And as to your adding that "sins stink, not words: lying, slander, detraction, false witness, and all abuse," and, "The mouth that lies kills the soul," and your warning "lest that stench penetrate my nostrils," I would believe you if I did not catch facts to the contrary; as if a fuller and a tanner should warn a perfumer to pass their shops with his nostrils stopped. I will do, then, what you command: I will close my nostrils, lest they be tormented by the most sweet odour of your truthfulness and blessings.

In praise and disparagement of me, because you were changeable, you argued with wonderful sharpness that you may speak both well and badly of me, just as I was allowed to censure Origen and Didymus, whom I had praised before. Hear, then, most wise man and head of Roman dialectic: it is no fault to praise one man in some things and accuse him in others, but to approve and disapprove the same thing. I will give an example, so that the prudent reader may understand with me what you do not understand. In Tertullian we praise the genius but condemn the heresy. In Origen we admire the knowledge of the Scriptures, and yet do not accept the falsity of his doctrines. In Didymus we proclaim both his memory and the purity of his faith on the Trinity; but in the other things in which he wrongly believed Origen, we withdraw from him. For not the vices of teachers are to be imitated, but their virtues. A certain man had at Rome an African grammarian, a most learned man; and he thought himself a rival of his teacher if he reproduced only the shrillness of his tongue and the faults of his mouth. In your little preface to Peri Archon you name me brother, call me a most eloquent colleague, and proclaim the truth of my faith. From these three you cannot detract; carp at the rest as you please, lest you seem to fight against your testimony about me. When you call me brother and colleague, you confess me worthy of your friendship. When you proclaim me eloquent, you no longer accuse me of unskilfulness. When you profess me catholic in everything, you cannot fix the charge of heresy on me. If outside these three you censure anything in me, you will not seem contrary to yourself. From this reckoning that conclusion arises: both that you err in censuring in me what you had praised before; and that I am not at fault if in the same men I proclaim what is to be praised and censure what is to be blamed.

You pass to the state of souls, and at greater length rebuke my smoke; and so that you may be allowed to be ignorant of what you deliberately pretend not to know, you ask me first about heavenly things: how angels, how archangels exist? What or what kind of dwelling they have? What difference there is among them, or whether none at all? What is the principle of the sun; whence the waxing of the moon, whence its waning; what or what kind is the course of the stars? I wonder how you forgot to put those little verses:

You press me to answer about the nature of things. If there were room, I could tell you the opinions of Lucretius after Epicurus, or of Aristotle after the Peripatetics, or of Plato and Zeno after the Academics and Stoics. And to pass to the church, where the rule of truth is, Genesis and the books of the prophets and Ecclesiastes suggest much to us on questions of this kind. Or if we are ignorant of these things, ought you therefore, in your Apology, on the state of souls, to have confessed ignorance of all things, and to ask your slanderers why they shamelessly demanded one thing from you when they themselves did not know so much? O richest trireme, which had come to enrich the poverty of the city of Rome with Eastern and Egyptian wares!

You write that among church writers there are three opinions about souls: one, which Origen follows; another, which Tertullian and Lactantius follow (though about Lactantius you lie most openly); a third, which we simple and foolish men follow, who do not understand that, if it is so, God is accused by us of injustice. And after this you swear that you do not know what is true. Tell me, I pray: do you think there is something outside these three in which the truth lies, and that in these three is falsehood? Or that of the three one is true? If there is something else, why do you shut the freedom of disputants within a narrow limit, and, having brought out falsehoods, keep silent about the truth? But if of the three one is true and the other two false, why with the same ignorance are you ignorant of the false together with the true? Or do you hide the truth so that it may be safe for you, when you wish, to defend the false? These are the smokes, these the mists, with which you try to take the light from men's eyes. Aristippus of our time, who bring into the Roman port a ship full of all goods, and, setting up a chair in public, display to us Hermagoras and Gorgias of Leontini: in your haste to sail you forgot in the East the merchandise of one little question. And again you cry out and boast that you learned at Aquileia and Alexandria that God is the creator of both souls and bodies. As if the question being aired were whether God or the devil made souls; and not whether souls existed before bodies, as Origen will have it, and did something on account of which they were bound to gross bodies; or whether they slept, torpid and drowsy, after the manner of dormice. These you are silent about, which all demand; and you answer what no one asks.

You also often mock my smoke, because I pretend to know what I do not know, and delude the rude crowd with a list of teachers. You, of course, are fiery, or rather lightning-like, who thunder in speaking and cannot hold the flames conceived in your mouth; and as that Bar Kochba, the author of the Jewish revolt, fanned a lighted straw in his mouth with his breath so as to be thought to vomit flames, so you too, another Salmoneus, light up everything through which you pass, and accuse us of being smoky, of whom perhaps it may be said, "Who touches the mountains, and they smoke"; nor do you understand what the smoke of the locusts means in the prophet, and that the beauty of your eyes cannot bear the bitterness of our smoke.

As for the charge of perjury, since you send me back to your manuscript, and I have answered you and Calpurnius for the most part in other books, let it suffice now to have said briefly that you demand from a sleeper what you never performed awake. I am guilty of a great crime if I told girls and virgins of Christ that secular books are not to be read, and that, warned in sleep, I promised not to read them. Your ship, promised to the city of Rome by revelation, promises one thing and does another. It had come to solve the questions of the astrologers, and it dissolved the faith of Christians. That which had run with full sails through the Ionian and Aegean, the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas, suffered shipwreck in the Roman port. Are you not ashamed to collect such ravings, and to impose on me the necessity of objecting similar things? Suppose another had seen a glorious dream about you: it would then have been modest and prudent to hide what you had heard, and not to glory in another's dream as in a great testimony. See what difference there is between your dream and mine. I report that I was humbly rebuked; you repeat boastfully that you were praised. Nor can you say, "It is nothing to me what another saw," since in your most brilliant books you say you were moved to translate by this reason, lest an illustrious man should lose his dream about you. This is all your effort: if you teach me perjury, you will not be a heretic.

I come to the gravest charge, in which, after our friendship was restored, you accuse me of faithlessness. I confess that among all the curses you either cast at me or threaten, nothing must be repelled by me so much as fraud, deceit and faithlessness. For to sin is human; to lay snares is devilish. Did we join right hands in the Anastasis, after the Lamb was sacrificed, for this, that we might steal your sheets at Rome? that dogs sent in might gnaw your uncorrected papers while you slept? And is it credible that we prepared accusers before you committed the crime? No doubt we knew what you were turning over in your mind? what another had dreamed about you? so that the Greek proverb might be fulfilled in you, and a sow teach Minerva. If I had sent Eusebius to bark, who stirred up the rage of Aterbius and the others against you? Is he not the one who judged me too a heretic because of my friendship with you? When I had satisfied him by condemning Origen's doctrines, you, shut up at home, never dared to see him, lest you either condemn what you did not wish or, openly resisting, bear the odium of heresy. Or can he not be a witness against you because he is your accuser? Before holy Epiphanius had come to Jerusalem, and given you peace with mouth and kiss but kept evil and guile in his heart; before we dictated letters to him to disparage you, so that he should write as a heretic one whom with kisses he had approved orthodox, Aterbius was barking against you at Jerusalem; and had he not gone away quickly, he would have felt the staff not of letters but of your right hand, with which you are accustomed to drive away dogs.

"Why," he says, "did you accept my falsified sheets? Why, after my translation, did you dare to fix your pen on the books Peri Archon? If I had erred as a man, you ought to have met me with private letters, and so flattered me as I now flatter you in my letters." This is my whole fault: that, accused by deceitful praises, I wished to clear myself, and this without odium to your name, so that what you alone had accused I referred to many, not objecting heresy to you but repelling it from me. Did I know you would be angry if I wrote against heretics? You had said that you took away heretical things from Origen's books: I believed you were no longer a supporter of heretics, and therefore I inveighed not against you but against heretics; and if I was too vehement in this, forgive me. I thought I should please you too. You say that your sheets were brought into public by the theft and plots of my servants, though they lay hidden in your room, or were only with the man who had charged you with the task. And how is it that above you confess that either no one had them or very few? If they lay hidden in your room, how were they with the man who had charged you with the task? But if the one man for whom they had been written had received them to be hidden, then they did not lie hidden only in your room, nor did the few have them whom you testified had them. You charge that they were taken away by theft, and again accuse that they were bought with great money and countless goods. In one matter and in a short letter, how much variety and discord of lying! May you accuse, and I not defend? When you accuse, you do not think of your friend. When I answer, then the right of friendship comes into your mind. Tell me, I pray: had you written the sheets to be hidden or to be published? If to be hidden, why did you write them? If to be published, why did you hide them?

"But in this I am to be blamed, that I did not restrain your accusers, my friends." Do you want me to bring out their letters, in which they accuse me of hypocrisy, because, knowing you a heretic, I kept silent; because, while I incautiously offer peace, I took up the internal wars of the church? You call them my disciples, who suspect me of being your fellow pupil. And because I was rather sparing in refuting your praises, they think me your fellow-initiate. Your prologue gave me this: that as a friend you hurt me more than as an enemy. They had once persuaded themselves (rightly or wrongly, they must see) that you are a heretic. If I wish to defend you, I will gain only this, that they accuse me together with you. In short, they object your praise to me, and think you wrote it not deceitfully but truly; and what you always praised in me before, they vehemently charge. What do you want me to do? To hold my disciples as accusers for your sake? To take on my own breast darts hurled at a friend?

For the books Peri Archon you even owe me thanks. For you, as you say, cutting off everything harmful, put better things in their place. I expressed them as they stood in the Greek. From this both your faith and the heresy of him whom you translated appear. It was written to me from the City by men eminent in Christ (Pammachius and Oceanus): "Answer your accuser, lest, if you keep silent, you seem to have consented." All with one voice demanded that I expose Origen's tricks, and show the poisons of the heretics to be avoided by Roman ears. What has this to do with injury to you? Are you the only one to have translated these books, and have you no partners in this work? Are you one of the Seventy translators, so that after your edition others may not translate? See, I too, as you say, translated many little books from Greek into Latin: you also have the power to translate them again as you wish; for both good and bad are imputed to their author. This would happen with you too, had you not said that you cut away the heretical and translated the best. For this is your knot, which cannot be untied. But if you erred as a man, condemn your former opinion.

But what will you do about your Apology, which you wrote for Origen's works? What about the volume of Eusebius? in which, though you changed much, and translated a heretic's writings under the name of a martyr, you nevertheless set down many things that do not agree with the church's faith. You even turn Latin books into Greek for us: will you forbid us to give our people foreign ones? If I had answered in another work, in which you had not hurt me, I might have seemed to translate what you had translated in order to injure you, to show you either unskilled or deceitful. But now a new kind of complaint: you grieve that you were answered in the very matter in which I was accused by you. It was said that Rome had been overturned by your translation; all demanded of me a remedy for this. Not that I was of any account; but those who asked thought I was something. You were the friend who had translated it: what do you want me to do? Must we obey God rather than men? Guard the Lord's substance, or conceal a fellow servant's theft? Can I not appease you unless I too commit with you things to be accused? If you had made no mention of my name, if you had not adorned me with excellent praises, I could have had some refuge, and pleaded various reasons for not translating again what had been translated. You, friend, compelled me to waste some days on this work, to bring into the open what Charybdis ought to have devoured; and yet, though hurt, I kept the rights of friendship toward you, and as far as was in me, so defended myself as not to accuse you. You are too suspicious and querulous, who refer to your own insult what is said against heretics. But if I cannot be your friend otherwise than by being a friend of heretics, I will bear your enmity more lightly than their friendship.

You also think I invented a new lie, composing a letter to you in my name as if written long ago, so that I may seem good and modest; which you never received at all. This can very easily be proved. Many at Rome have copies of it, from about three years ago, who did not wish to send it to you, knowing what you were bandying about my name and what wicked things, unworthy of the Christian profession, you were inventing. I wrote it unknowing, as to a friend. They did not deliver it to him whom they knew to be an enemy, sparing both my error and your conscience. And at the same time you argue that if I had written such a letter to you, I ought not to have written many evil things against you in another little book. This is your whole error, and this your just complaint: that what we say against heretics you pretend was said against you; and unless we spare them, you think you are violated. Or do we not give you bread because we dash the stone against the heretics' brains? And so that you may not approve our letter, you say that Pope Anastasius's too rests on a similar fraud, about which I answered you before: if you suspect that it is not his, you have where to convict us of falsehood before him. But if it is his, as this year's letters against you also prove, in vain and falsely do you try to accuse it as false, since from his true letter we show that ours is true.

In excusing your lie, how elegant you wished to be: and so as not to produce the six thousand books of Origen, you demand of me the writings of Pythagoras. Where is that confidence with which, with puffed cheeks, you so often sounded that you had corrected in the books Peri Archon what you had read in other books of Origen, and had given back to them not others' but their own? From so great a forest of books you cannot produce one shrub or shoot. These are the true smokes, these the mists, which, while you charge me with them, you know have been quenched and dispersed in you by me; nor do you lower your broken neck, but with more impudence than unskilfulness you say I deny what is at hand, so that, having promised mountains of gold, you do not bring out of your treasures even a leather coin. I recognize just hatreds against me, and you rave against us with a true madness. For unless I boldly demanded what does not exist, you would seem to have what you do not have. You demand from me the books of Pythagoras. Who told you that his volumes exist? Are not these the words in my letter which you accuse? "But suppose that I erred in youth, and, trained in the studies of the philosophers, that is, of the Gentiles, at the beginning of my faith did not know the Christian doctrines, and thought there was in the apostles what I had read in Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles." I spoke of their doctrines, not of their books, which I could learn in Cicero, Brutus, and Seneca. Read the little speech for Vatinius, and others where mention is made of the brotherhoods. Turn over Tully's dialogues. Look at the whole coast of Italy, which was once called Great Greece, and you will recognize bronzes inscribed with public letters of Pythagorean doctrines. Whose are those Golden Precepts? Are they not Pythagoras's? in which all his doctrines are briefly contained, and on which the philosopher Iamblichus commented in a very broad work, imitating in part Moderatus, a most eloquent man, and Archippus and Lysis, hearers of Pythagoras. Of these, Archippus and Lysis had schools in Greece, that is, at Thebes, who, holding their teacher's precepts by memory, used their memory in place of books; from them comes this saying: "By every device we must banish, and cut away with fire and sword and every means, sickness from the body, ignorance from the soul, luxury from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the house, and from all things in common, excess." Which we can turn into Latin thus: "By every means must be put to flight and cut off: languor from the body, unskill from the mind, luxury from the belly, sedition from the city, discord from the house, and in common from all things, intemperance." These too are Pythagorean precepts: "That friends have all things in common. That a friend is another self; and that two times above all are to be cared for, morning and evening, that is, what we are about to do and what we have done. That after God, truth is to be worshipped, which alone makes men nearest to God." And those riddles which Aristotle follows up most carefully in his books: "Do not overstep the balance," that is, "do not transgress justice." "Do not stir fire with a sword," that is, do not provoke an angry and swollen mind with abusive words. "The crown is not to be plucked," that is, "the laws of cities are to be kept." "The heart is not to be eaten," that is, "grief is to be cast out of the mind." "When you have set out," he says, "do not return," that is, "after death do not long for this life." "Do not walk on the public road," that is, "do not follow the errors of the many." "A swallow is not to be received into the house," that is, "chatterers and wordy men are not to be kept under the same roof." "Burden is to be put on the burdened; with those laying it down you must not share," that is, "for those advancing to virtue precepts are to be increased; those giving themselves to ease are to be left." And since I had said I had read Pythagorean doctrines, hear what Pythagoras first discovered among the Greeks: that souls are immortal and pass from some bodies into others. Which Virgil too follows in the sixth book of the Aeneid, saying:

That he had been first Euphorbus, second Callides, third Hermotimus, fourth Pyrrhus, and lastly Pythagoras; and that after certain cycles of time what had been comes to be again, and nothing in the world is to be seen as new. That philosophy is the meditation of death, daily striving to lead out the freedom of the soul from the prison of the body; that learnings are recollections; and much else which Plato pursues in his books, especially in the Phaedo and Timaeus. For after the Academy and countless disciples, feeling that much was lacking to his teaching, he came to Great Greece, and there, instructed in Pythagoras's teaching by Archytas of Tarentum and Timaeus of Locri, he mixed the elegance and charm of Socrates with his disciplines: all of which, with the name changed, Origen is convicted of having transferred into his books Peri Archon. In what, then, did I err, if I said that as a young man I thought there was in the apostles what I had read in Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles? Not, as you slander and invent, in the books of Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles, but what I had read were in them, and others' writings taught me they had held. And this kind of expression is very frequent: as if I should say, "The doctrines I read in Socrates I thought true." Not that Socrates wrote any books; but that I read in Plato and other Socratics that he had held them. And again: "I wished to imitate the deeds I had read in Alexander and Scipio": not that they described their own deeds, but that I read in others what I admired they had done. Even if, then, I could not show that writings of Pythagoras himself exist, nor prove them by his son and daughter and other disciples, you would not hold me guilty of lying, because I said I had read not books but doctrines; and you err in vain, thinking that I wished to protect your lie, so that unless I produce one book of Pythagoras you lose six thousand books of Origen.

I will come to the epilogues, that is, your curses, in which you exhort me to repentance, and unless I am converted, that is, unless I keep silent when you accuse, you threaten me with destruction. And you announce that this scandal will redound on my head, who by my answer provoked you, a most gentle man of Mosaic meekness, to the madness of writing. For you boast that you know crimes which I confessed to you alone, as a most dear friend, and that they will be brought into the open; that I am to be painted in my own colours; and that I ought to remember that I lay at your feet, lest you cut off my head with the sword of your mouth. And after much in which you exult furiously, you call yourself back and say you desire peace, only on condition that from now on I keep silent, that is, that I do not write against heretics nor dare to answer your accusation. If I do this, I shall be a brother and colleague, a most eloquent man, and friend and companion; and, what is greater than these, you will judge catholic everything I translated of Origen. But if I mutter and stir, at once I shall be impure and heretical and unworthy of your friendship. These are my praises; so you exhort me to peace, and you do not grant that even groans and tears are free to grief.

I too could paint you in your own colours, and rage against one raging, and say whatever I know or do not know; and with the same licence, or rather fury and madness, heap up things false or true, so that I should be ashamed to say and you to hear; and object to you things which would condemn either the accuser or the accused, so that by the hardness of my brow I might win the reader's belief, and what I wrote shamelessly might be judged written truly. But far be it from Christian ways that, while seeking others' blood, they offer their own, and are murderers without a sword, by will. This befits your goodness and gentleness and simplicity, who from one dunghill of your breast bring out both the odour of roses and the stench of corpses, and, against the prophetic sentence, call bitter what you had praised as sweet. Nor is it necessary that in church treatises we air a matter of the tribunals; and you will hear nothing more about this except that saying from the crossroads: "When you have said what you want, you will hear what you do not want." Or if a common proverb seems cheap to you, and a most wise man is better pleased with the sayings of philosophers and poets, read that Homeric line:

Do you want me, then, to keep silent? Do not accuse. Lay down the sword, and I will throw away the shield. In one thing I cannot agree with you: to spare heretics, not to prove myself catholic. If this is the cause of discord, I can die; I cannot keep silent. I ought indeed to have answered from all of Scripture your madness, and, like David playing the harp, soothed the fury of your breast with divine words; but I will be content with a few testimonies of one book, and set wisdom against folly, so that if you despise human things you may at least not neglect the divine. Hear, then, what the wise Solomon says of you and of all the envious, reviling and insulting: "Fools, while they are eager for insults, having become impious, hated understanding. Do not devise evil against your friend. And do not be at enmity with a man without cause. The impious exalt insult. Cut off from you a crooked mouth, and drive unjust lips far from you: the eyes of the insolent, the tongue of the unjust, hands shedding the blood of the just, a heart devising evil thoughts, and feet hastening to do evil. He who relies on lies feeds the winds and follows flying birds. For he has left the ways of his vineyard, and made the axles of his husbandry go astray. He walks through dry and desert land, and gathers barrenness with his hands. The mouth of the rash draws near to ruin; and he who utters curses is most foolish. Every simple man is a blessed soul; the passionate man is dishonourable. By the sins of his lips the sinner falls into a snare. The ways of fools are right in their own sight. The fool shows his anger the same day. Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord. He who guards his mouth keeps his soul; and he who is rash with his lips will terrify himself. The wicked man does evil with insult, and the fool spreads out his malice. You will seek wisdom among the wicked and not find it. The rash man will be filled with his own ways. The wise man by fearing turns from evil; the fool, confident, mingles with it. The long-suffering man is great in prudence; the faint-hearted is very imprudent. He who slanders the poor provokes his maker. The tongue of the wise knows good things, and the mouth of fools pronounces evil. The passionate man prepares quarrels, and everyone who exalts his heart is unclean before God. He who lays hand on hand unjustly will not go unpunished. He who loves life spares his mouth. Insult goes before ruin, and an evil thought before a fall. He who fixes his eyes devises perverse things, and provokes all evils with his lips. The lips of a fool lead him into evils, and the bold mouth calls for death. The malicious man will suffer many losses. Better is a just poor man than a lying rich one. It is glory to a man to turn away from curses; but he who is a fool binds himself to them. Do not love to disparage, lest you be uprooted. Sweet to a man is the bread of lying; afterwards his mouth will be filled with gravel. He who gathers treasures by a lying tongue pursues vain things and will come into the snares of death. Do not say anything in the ear of a fool, lest he mock your wise words. A club and a sword and an arrow are deadly: so also is a man who bears false witness against his friend. As birds and sparrows fly away, so an idle curse will not come upon him. Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him; but answer a fool according to his folly, lest he seem wise to himself. He who lies in wait for his friends, when he is seen, says, I did it in jest. A gridiron to coals, and wood to fire, and a reviling man to the tumult of strife. If your enemy asks you with a loud voice, do not consent to him: for there are seven wickednesses in his soul. A stone is heavy and sand hardly bearable, but the anger of a fool is heavier than both. Wrath is cruel and anger sharp, and jealousy impatient. The impious slanders the poor: and he who trusts in the boldness of his heart is most foolish. The fool brings out all his anger; the wise man deals it out in parts. An evil son has swords for teeth and knives for molars, to consume the weak from the earth and the poor from among men." Taught, then, by these examples, I did not wish to bite one biting, nor to fulfil retaliation; and I preferred to charm away the madness of the furious, and to pour into a poisoned breast the antidote of one book. But I fear lest, profiting nothing, I be compelled to sing that saying of David and console myself with these words: "Sinners were estranged from the womb; they went astray from the belly. They spoke falsehood; their fury is after the likeness of a serpent: like the deaf asp that stops its ears, which will not hear the voice of charmers, of the enchanter charming wisely. God will break their teeth in their mouth: the Lord will shatter the molars of the lions. They will come to nothing, like water running away. He bends his bow until they are weakened. Like wax that melts they will be taken away: fire fell on them, and they did not see the sun." And again: "The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance of the impious: he will wash his hands in the blood of the sinner. And man will say: If indeed there is fruit for the righteous, indeed there is a God judging them on the earth."

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