Apology against Jerome 2.8–2.25

But let us now pass from here to clearing myself of another charge, if indeed, pressed by his conscience as well, he admits himself convicted of perjury and breach of faith. Otherwise, if he denies it, I can produce very many brothers as witnesses who, staying in my cells on the Mount of Olives, copied very many of Cicero's dialogues for him; whose quires, as they were writing, I often held in my hands and read over, and I knew that he paid them much higher wages than are usual for other writings. He cannot in any way deny that once, when he had come from Bethlehem to Jerusalem and had brought with him a book containing one dialogue of Cicero and the same one of Plato in Greek, he gave me that very book, and it was with me for some time. But why do I dwell so long on a matter clearer than daylight? when to all that we have said above this too is added, where all invention ceases: that, while in the monastery at Bethlehem, not very long ago, he carried out the part of a grammarian, and expounded his Maro, and the comic and lyric poets and historians, to little boys entrusted to him to learn the fear of God; so that he became, of course, a teacher of the Gentile authors whom he had sworn that he would deny Christ if he so much as read.

But let us see what else he blames. He says these are doctrines of the Gentiles: see by what judgment he condemns himself. He says that what he himself writes are the doctrines of the Gentiles. He slips; but a hand must be held out to him; he must not be pressed too hard. For while he is all flying in eloquence and is carried away by abuse and invective, he forgets himself and rolls away from reason. Do not, brother, rashly condemn yourself even in things that are not necessary. Neither you nor Origen is at once to be counted among the Gentiles if, as you yourself said, wishing to defend the justice of God and to answer those who say that all things are moved by fate or chance, and wishing to show that the providence of God which governs all things is just, you said that each soul has itself procured the causes of inequality from the movements and feelings of a former life which it had in the heavens; or even if you said that it befits that good, unchangeable and simple nature of the Trinity to restore its whole creation at the end of all things to that for which it was created from the beginning, and that after long punishments, made equal to the spans of ages, which God inflicts on each one with the disposition not so much of one who is angry as of one who heals, since he is free from the fault of resentment, he will at some time, acting as physician and healer, set an end to punishments. How true these things are which you have said, God will see; yet they do not seem to me to contain much impiety towards God, nor anything of heathenism, especially if you say them with this intention, desiring by whatever reasoning to defend the justice of God.

Do not, then, be too much disturbed on account of these things, and do not needlessly subject yourself either to repentance or to condemnation. But this really is something from which we cannot defend or excuse you: it is proved to have been said by you not only in a heathen way but beyond all heathenism, indeed beyond all impiety, that in this very little book of which we made mention above you said that God has a mother-in-law. And what so impious or profane could have been said by anyone, even of the Gentile poets? For it would be foolish if I asked you where you read this in the holy Scriptures. I ask whether your Flaccus, or Maro, whether Plautus or Terence, or certainly whether any satirist among all his filthy and shameless words, ever uttered with his mouth this outrage against God. I suppose this thing deceived and misled you: that the girl to whom the word of God was addressed was called the bride of Christ, so that for this reason you thought her mother in the flesh should also be called God's mother-in-law. And you did not know that these things are said not according to the order of the flesh but according to the grace of the Spirit. For she is called bride because the word of God is joined to the human soul as in a kind of sacred marriage. But if by such a union the girl's mother too is associated with Christ through faith, you could more rightly have called her too the bride of Christ than the mother-in-law of God. Now it remains for you to call the girl's father God's father-in-law, and her sisters his kinswomen, and to declare the girl God's daughter-in-law. So, while you wish to seem wholly a follower of the eloquence of Plautus and Tully, you have forgotten how the Apostle names the whole church, that is, parents with children, mother with daughters, brothers with sisters, all together, one virgin or bride, saying: "For I have betrothed you all to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ." But you, while you boast that you have had not Paul but Porphyry as your introducer, by following Porphyry himself, who wrote impious and sacrilegious books against Christ and against God, have also, introduced by him, as you say, fallen into this pit of blasphemy.

But if you truly wish to do penance for your revilings, if you are not mocking when you say this, if you do not, in a quarrelsome and contentious spirit, shrink even from defaming yourself for this sole purpose, so long as you discolour another; if you have repented of your sayings not by art but in good faith: do penance for this so grave and shameful blasphemy; for here you blasphemed against God. For to say something about creatures and to err, especially if not from a wish to insult but while one desires, as you say, to assert the justice of God, is not too execrable an offence. To set one's mouth against heaven is grave; to speak injustice or insult against the Most High is ruinous. Let that be mourned which is hard to cure. For who is there who, suffering from jaundice and in danger in his very head and face and life, cries out loudly that a light whitlow of the foot or a very easily healed hurt of his nail should be cured?

That point, indeed, is very slight and hardly worth an answer, that in enumerating his teachers, whom he says he bought from the synagogue, he adds, to goad us: "For I did not teach myself, as some have"; no doubt looking at us, against whom he has brought the whole weight of his tearing from the beginning. And I wonder that he chose to say this, since he had a greater and truer matter for disparaging me: that, though I stayed long among many distinguished teachers, I have nothing worthy of their teaching or instruction. But this man, who in his whole life did not stay thirty whole days at Alexandria, where Didymus is, boasts far and wide through almost all his books that he is a disciple of Didymus the seeing, and had Didymus as his kathēgētēs, that is, his teacher, in the holy Scriptures. And all this boasting was acquired in one month. I, who stayed six years for God's sake, and again after some interval two more, where Didymus was, of whom alone you boast, and where there were others no less than he, whom you do not know even by face, Serapion and Menites, men brothers by nature, character and learning; where there was the old man Paul, a disciple of Peter the martyr; and, to come to the masters of the desert, to whom we gave ourselves more attentively and more often, where there were Macarius the disciple of Antony, and the other Macarius, and Isidore, and Pambo, all friends of God, who taught us what they themselves learned from God: what matter for boasting could I have from all these, if it were fitting or expedient! But I blush even to repeat these things, while I wish to show you not, as you say, that I lacked teachers through my own talent, but, what I regret more, that my talent was rather lacking to my teachers. But why, fool that I am, do I enumerate holy Christian men? He does not say that we taught ourselves on their account, but because we did not take Barabbas, his teacher from the synagogue, and were not introduced to logic through Porphyry's Introduction. Forgive me for preferring to seem unskilled and unlearned rather than to be called a disciple of Barabbas. When Christ and Barabbas were set before me together, I, as an unskilled man, chose Christ. You, as I see, cry out with those who say: "Not this man, but Barabbas." For your Porphyry, tell me, I pray, what did he teach you, he who wrote volumes of blasphemy against the Christians and against our religion? What good did these teachers of whom you boast so much teach you, one from the idols of demons, and the other from the synagogue, as you say, of Satan? I see nothing except what they themselves knew. For Porphyry taught you to speak evil of Christians, to cut down virgins, the continent, deacons, presbyters, and to defame in published books every rank and order of Christians altogether. And that Barabbas of yours from the synagogue, chosen in place of Christ, taught you to hope for the resurrection of the flesh not in power but in frailty; to become a friend of the letter that kills and an enemy of the Spirit that gives life. And certain other more secret things, which, if the matter requires, will be brought forward later in due time.

But why is my speech drawn out at length? Let us not answer his abuse and insults; let us not meet his tearings, for which work Porphyry sharpens his pen daily. For our Jesus, not the teacher Barabbas, taught us to be silent in the face of this. Let us come to this: to show how true are the things he has written either to excuse himself or to accuse us. He says that there are only two short prefaces of his in which he seemed to praise Origen; that he praised him, however, in that work of translation in which nothing at all doctrinal, nothing about the faith, was said; and that in those of his works which he himself translated nothing at all of the kind is brought in which he now censures to please the synagogue, not to build up Christians. And although it ought to be enough to make him keep silent that he blames in others' writings what is brought forward from his own, yet let us see how truly he has spoken in this too. From the preface to his translation of fourteen homilies, or short discourses, of Origen on Ezekiel, writing to a certain Vincent: "It is a great thing, my friend," he says, "that you ask, that I should make Origen Latin, and give to Roman ears too the man who, in the judgment of Didymus the seeing, is the second teacher of the churches after the apostles." And after some other matter: "And this," he says, "I note briefly, so that you may know that Origen's works on the whole of Scripture are of three kinds. His first works are excerpts, which in Greek are called scholia, in which he touched summarily and briefly on things that seemed to him obscure or to have some difficulty. The second is the homiletic kind, of which the present translation also is. The third is what he himself called tomoi, which we can call volumes, in which work he spread all the sails of his genius to the blowing winds, and, leaving the land, fled into the open sea. I know you desire me to translate every kind of his writing; I have stated beforehand the reason why I could not; yet this I promise: if, at your prayer, Jesus restores my health, I will translate, I do not say all, for it would be rash to say that, but very many, on the condition I have often laid down for you, that I supply the voice and you the secretary."

Again, the preface to the Song of Songs: "To the most blessed Pope Damasus. While Origen surpassed all others in his other books, in the Song of Songs he surpassed himself. For in eleven volumes, which come to almost twenty thousand lines, he discussed first the Seventy translators, then Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, and finally the fifth edition, which he writes that he found on the shore of Actium, so magnificently and openly that it seems to me that in him was fulfilled what is said: 'The king brought me into his chamber.' And so, passing over that work, because translating such great matters, so worthy a work, into Latin requires immense leisure, labour, and expense, I have translated these two treatises, which he composed in the manner of daily speech for little ones still at the breast, faithfully rather than ornately, offering you a taste of his meanings, not a meal, so that you may consider how highly those things that are great should be valued, when the things that are small can please so much."

Again from the preface of the Commentary on Micah, written to Paula and Eustochium, after some other matter: "For as to their saying that I plunder the volumes of Origen, and that it is not fitting to contaminate the writings of the ancients, which they think a vehement reproach, I count it the greatest praise, since I wish to imitate those who please all prudent men and us."

Again from the preface to the translation of the Hebrew names, after some other matter, he says this: "And lest, when the building was finished, the last hand should as it were be wanting, I have interpreted the words and names of the New Testament, wishing in part to imitate Origen, whom no one but an ignorant man denies to be the teacher of the churches after the apostles. For among the other splendid monuments of his genius he laboured in this too, that what Philo as a Jew had left out, he as a Christian might supply."

Again from the letter to Marcella: "Ambrose, by whose supply of papers, expenses and secretaries our true Adamantius and Chalcenterus produced such countless books, in a certain letter which he wrote to him from Athens, relates that he never took food in Origen's presence without reading, never went to sleep unless one of the brothers was sounding out the sacred writings; that he did this day and night, so that reading took up prayer and prayer reading."

Again from another letter to Marcella: "The blessed martyr Pamphilus, whose life Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, set out in about three volumes, wishing to equal Demetrius of Phalerum and Pisistratus in zeal for a sacred library, sought throughout the world for the images of minds, which are the true and eternal monuments; and then, pursuing above all the books of Origen with great expense, he dedicated them to the church of Caesarea. This library, partly damaged, Acacius and then Euzoius, bishops of the same church, tried to restore on parchment. Though he found many things, and left us a list of what he had found, he confessed, by not listing them, that the commentary on the hundred and twenty-sixth Psalm and the treatise on the letter Phe were not found. Not that so great a man, we mean Adamantius, passed over anything, but that through the negligence of later generations it has not lasted to our memory."

But perhaps you will say to me: "Why do you fill your pages with superfluous matter? Does he too say that it is a crime for Origen to be named, or for praise of his genius to be given? Show it, if such a man is proclaimed as great; all the more if there are any passages of his in which he is called an apostolic man or a teacher of the church, as he himself brings forward in what precedes; or if there is anything such as seems to commend his faith, not merely his genius." This I will indeed do. Yet I brought these things forward because, where he speaks of so great a man, it is in that short preface of mine in which he says Origen is defended as an apostle or prophet, or raised to the sky: I think this was the language of praise he had in mind. And if anywhere we perhaps praised his knowledge, all my praises of him are of that kind, for which this great fire is kindled against you, while he thinks it not right that such praises be imputed to him from his own writings. But since he does not deign to have a person equal with us in judgment, and condemns us even on suspicions, while he himself does not wish to be held even by his own handwriting, nor thinks that in this case the judgment of holy Scripture ought to be observed, which commands that judgment be made without respect of persons: let us satisfy him on our behalf not as equity, but as he himself, wishes. For he says: "You, if you translated Origen, are to be blamed; I, even if I said the same things for which he is blamed, did well, and they should be read and held. You, if you praised his genius or knowledge, are guilty; I, if I praised his genius, it is nothing."

"But show," he says, "where I so praised him as to excuse his faith." Not on equal terms indeed; but wherever you lead I will follow. Writing a certain little book, he wished to include as in a kind of catalogue how much Varro wrote among the Latins and how much Origen among us in Greek, in which he speaks thus: "Antiquity admires Marcus Terentius Varro because he wrote so countless books among the Latins. The Greeks extol Chalcenterus with wonderful praises because he composed so many books that any of us could not copy as many of another's with his own hand. And since it is idle now to weave a catalogue of Greek volumes among the Latins, I will mention some things about the one who wrote in Latin, so that we may understand that we are sleeping the sleep of Epimenides, and putting into amassing wealth the zeal they put into learning secular literature. Varro, then, wrote forty-five books of Antiquities, four On the Life of the Roman People." And when he had enumerated one by one everything Varro wrote, he added after this: "You ask why mention has been made of Varro and Chalcenterus: plainly so that we may come to our Adamantius and Chalcenterus, who sweated with such zeal in the labour of the holy Scriptures that he rightly received the name Adamantius. Do you wish to know how many monuments of his genius he left? The following list shows. He wrote thirteen books on Genesis; two books of Mystical Homilies; excerpts on Exodus, excerpts on Leviticus." And after much else: "Also," he says, "single books: four books Peri Archon, two books On the Resurrection, and two other dialogues On the Resurrection." And when he had enumerated all his works according to the faithfulness of the catalogue, he added and says: "Do you see that Greeks and Latins alike are surpassed by the labour of one man? For who could ever read as much as he wrote? And for this sweat what reward did he receive? He is condemned by Bishop Demetrius, with the exception of the bishops of Palestine, Arabia, Phoenicia and Achaia; the city of Rome consents to his condemnation; it gathers its senate against him, not because of novelty of doctrines, not because of heresy, as mad dogs now pretend against him, but because they could not bear the glory of his eloquence and knowledge, and when he spoke all were thought dumb. Why I have written these things, and dictated them by the light of a poor lamp, in quick but not careful speech, you can understand if you think of the Epicuruses and Aristippuses."

If, I pray you, when you were dictating these things by the light, as you say, of a poor lamp, in quick but not careful speech, a prophet had stood beside you and cried out: "O writer, restrain this voice, check your pen; for the time will come, and not long hence, when you will make a schism from the church, and, to find some colour of excuse for that schism, you will begin to defame these books which you now make wonderful to all; and this man whom you now call your Chalcenterus, and say was named Adamantius for the merit of his praiseworthy labour, you will say wrote not so much books for the good of the soul as poisonous doctrines. This man whom you deny to have been justly condemned by Demetrius in a matter of faith, and whom you deny to have been accused for novelty of doctrines, you will say is to be execrated for novelty of doctrines; and what you now say mad dogs pretend against him, you yourself will pretend. You too will gather the Roman senate against him, as you now write, with your letters of warning, with oaths, with satellites flying round, and you will make your Chalcenterus such a return for all his labours. Therefore beware of writing these things now, lest, having written them and done those, you be condemned much more truly by your own judgments than he by others'." Do you think you would have believed that prophet when he said this to you, and would you not rather have thought him mad than that you would come to this? But this is rivalry, which does not spare even friends so long as it wounds enemies. But you, going beyond this, do not spare yourself, so long as you destroy not enemies but friends.

Again from the preface to the Hebrew Questions, after much else: "Of Origen," he says, "I am silent, whose name (if one may compare small things with great) is more hated than mine. Though in his homilies, which he speaks to the common people, he follows the common edition, in his tomes, overcome by the Hebrew truth and surrounded by his own troops, he sometimes seeks the help of a foreign tongue. This one thing I say: I would wish, with the ill-will his name bears, to have also his knowledge of the Scriptures, caring not a straw for the images and shadows of ghosts, whose nature is said to be to frighten little children and to chatter in dark corners." But I should neither wonder nor complain any longer about what he does to me, since he did not spare men so great and such as these. For I will show likewise from his prefaces with what figures he tears Bishop Ambrose of holy memory, with what disparagements he cuts him, in the very places where he nonetheless praises Origen. The preface to the Homilies on Luke, to Paula and Eustochium: "A few days ago you told me that you had read certain commentaries on Matthew and Luke, of which one was dull in its meanings, and the other played with words and slept in its thoughts. Therefore you ask me, despising such trifles, to translate at least the thirty-nine homilies of our Adamantius on Luke, as they are found in Greek. It is a troublesome task and like a torment to write, as Tully says, with another's stomach and not one's own; yet I will do it now for this reason, that you do not ask for loftier things. For what the holy Blesilla once begged of me at Rome, that I should render into our tongue his twenty-six tomes on Matthew, and five others on Luke, and thirty-two on John, you see is beyond my strength, my leisure and my labour. But, so far as your authority and your will prevail with me, I have laid aside for a little the books of Hebrew Questions, so that at your judgment I might dictate these things, whatever they are, not mine but another's, by a profitable work; especially since I hear on my left hand a raven, that bird of ill omen, croaking and mocking the colours of all the birds in a wonderful way, though he himself is all dark. And so I confess, before he objects it, that in these treatises Origen plays like a boy with dice. His manly works and the serious works of his old age are another thing: if it please you, and I am able, if the Lord grants me leave to turn them into the Latin tongue, and I complete the work I first laid aside, then you will be able to see, or rather through you the Roman tongue will learn, how much good it did not know before, and has now begun to know."

See what he thinks about Origen and about Ambrose. If he wishes to deny what everyone knows, that he said this of the holy Ambrose, he will be convicted first by the fact that among the Latins only Ambrose's commentary on Luke, and no other's, is current. Next, he knows that I have a letter of his in which, while excusing others for this very thing, he turns the suspicion on Ambrose. But since that letter contains also some more secret matters which I do not wish to publish for the present before the time, we will prove it from other similar passages. Meanwhile he extols Origen's books, as we said above, to every admiration, and says that "if he translates them, the Roman tongue will learn how much good it did not know before and has now begun to know," that is, twenty-six books on Matthew, he says, and five on Luke, and thirty-two on John. These are the books he magnifies, in which there are contained exactly the same things, but more broadly and copiously, as in these books Peri Archon for which he censures me. And if he promises to translate these, why does he accuse me for similar ones? But since we promised to prove how he tears a man worthy of all admiration, Bishop Ambrose, who was a kind of pillar and impregnable tower not only of the church of Milan but of all the churches, we will set down one more of his prefaces, from which you may see how foully and unworthily he tears so great a man; and again how he raises Didymus to the sky with praises, whom he afterwards plunges down to hell; and how he says of the city of Rome, by God's favour the head of Christians, the things that used to be said when Gentile peoples and persecuting emperors dwelt in it.

The preface to Paulinian, On the Holy Spirit: "While I was living in Babylon, and was a resident of the purple-clad harlot, and lived under the law of the Quirites, I wished to chatter something about the Holy Spirit, and to dedicate the work I had begun to the pontiff of that same city. And behold, that pot which in Jeremiah is seen after the rod began to boil from the face of the north, and the senate of the Pharisees cried out together, and no scribe, not even a feigned one, but the whole faction of ignorance conspired against me, as if battle had been declared. At once I returned to Jerusalem as by right of return from exile, and after the hut of Romulus and the Lupercal of the naked I looked upon the inn of Mary and the cave of the Saviour. And so, my brother Paulinian, since the aforesaid pontiff Damasus, who first urged me to this work, has now fallen asleep in the Lord, helped now by your prayers and by those of the handmaids of Christ venerable to me, Paula and Eustochium, I murmur here in Judaea, at your call, the song which I could not sing in a foreign land, thinking that place much more august which bore the Saviour of the world than that which bore a brother's murderer. And to confess the author in the title, I have preferred to be the translator of another's work rather than, as some do, adorn myself like an ugly jackdaw with others' colours. I read some time ago the little books of a certain man on the Holy Spirit, and, according to the saying of the comic poet (Terence), I saw from good Greek things Latin things not good. There is nothing dialectical there, nothing manly and close-knit to draw the reader into assent even against his will; but all is flaccid, soft, glossy and pretty, painted with colours sought out from here and there. But my Didymus, having the eye of the bride in the Song of Songs, and those lights which Jesus commands to be lifted up to the fields already white, sees far higher, and restores to us the ancient custom that a prophet be called a Seer. Certainly whoever reads him will recognize the thefts of the Latins, and will despise the rivulets when he has begun to drink from the springs. He is unskilled in speech, but not in knowledge, showing the apostolic man by his very style, as much by the weight of his meanings as by the simplicity of his words."

You have heard how the man he had before called a raven and all dark he now calls again a jackdaw, painting itself with others' feathers or colours; and how basely he tears him, and says that a man has nothing manly who was chosen by God for the glory of the churches of Christ, who spoke of the Lord's testimonies in the presence of persecuting kings and was not put to shame. The holy Ambrose wrote on the Holy Spirit not only with words but with his own blood. For he offered his blood to the persecutors, and shed it within himself; but he was still reserved by God for other labours. And even if he followed the catholic Greek writers of our faith and took something from their writings, it ought not at once to have been your chief care, your labour, your study, to translate Didymus's book on the Holy Spirit for this reason, that the thefts of one might be known who perhaps was under the necessity of writing in order to answer the heretics then raging. Is this Christian modesty? Do we so keep the warnings of the Apostle, who says, "Do nothing through rivalry or vain glory"? Next, to repeat the same thing again, how is it that you who preach that one must not steal, steal? A little before you said that in the translation of Micah it was objected against you that you stole the sayings of Origen. You did not indeed deny the theft, but you say: "What they think a vehement reproach against me, I count the greatest praise, since I wish to imitate him who pleases all prudent men and us." Your thefts bring you the greatest praise; with you, others' thefts make them ravens and jackdaws. If you do right to imitate Origen, whom you call second after the apostles, why do you cut down the man who followed Didymus, whom you nonetheless name a prophet and designate an apostolic man? If, then, you did not spare even a man so great and such as Ambrose; and if him whom you write to be second after the apostles and to please all prudent men, and whom you raised to the sky with a thousand other praises, not in two, as you say, but in countless writings of yours, you now make a heretic, whom before you made an apostle; and this very Didymus, whom you now designate a prophet and seer, having the eye of the bride of the Song of Songs, and an apostolic man by the weight of his meanings, you again charge as a perverse teacher, and with your censor's rod, as you call it, separate into the company of heretics (from whom you received that rod I do not know: for we know that Peter once received the keys from Christ; what spirit hands out these censor's rods now, you must see): if, I say, you condemn again with your mouth all these whom you praised with your mouth, why should I, a flea compared with them, complain about myself if you now tear me, whom you had praised before in your letters, and in your Chronicle had joined with Florentius and Bonosus for the nobility, as you say, of my life?