Apology against Rufinus 2.11–2.22

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.