Apology against Rufinus 3.2–3.15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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