Apology against Rufinus 3.16–3.32

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.