Apology against Rufinus 1.1–1.15

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.