Letters 51.1–51.9

[Epiphanius to John, bishop of Jerusalem.] We ought, dearly beloved, not to abuse the honor of the clergy for pride, but by keeping God's commandments and observing them most carefully to be what we are called. For if the holy Scripture says, 'Their clergy will not profit them,' what can the arrogance of clerical rank avail us, who sin not only in thought and feeling but also in speech? For I have heard that you are swollen with anger against us, and are enraged, and threaten to write to the ends of the earth, not to name places and provinces. And where is the fear of God, which ought to shake us with that trembling spoken of by the Lord: 'If anyone is angry with his brother without cause, he will be liable to judgment'? Not that I much care if you write what you please; for, according to Isaiah, papyrus letters were written and sent over the waters, which quickly pass away with the world. We have done you no harm, no injury, nor have we extorted anything by violence. In the monastery of the brothers (and brothers from abroad, who owed nothing to your province, and who, on account of our littleness and the letters we often sent them, had also begun to be at variance with your communion), so that they should not seem to be separated from the church by a certain harshness and by their conscience of the ancient faith, we ordained a deacon and, after he had ministered, a presbyter. You ought to have rejoiced at this, understanding that we were compelled to do it for the fear of God, especially since there is no difference in God's priesthood where the good of the church is provided for. For although the individual bishops of the church have churches under them for which they are seen to take care, and no one extends himself beyond another's measure, still the love of Christ, in which there is no pretence, should be put before everything; and one should consider not what was done, but at what time, in what way, among whom, and why it was done. For when I saw that a great number of holy brothers were living in the monastery, and that the holy presbyters Jerome and Vincent, out of modesty and humility, would not offer the sacrifices due to their title and labor in that part of the ministry which is the chief salvation of Christians; and that you could not find and lay hold of the servant of God, who often fled from you, and from the heavy burden of the priesthood, which he did not want to take up, and that no other bishop could easily find him either (so that I was quite amazed at how, by God's dispensation, he came to us with the deacons of the monastery and the other brothers, to make amends to me, since I had some grievance against them), then, while the service was being held in the church of the village near our monastery, without his knowing it or having the least suspicion, we had him seized by a number of deacons and his mouth held, lest perhaps, wishing to free himself, he should adjure us by the name of Christ; and first we ordained him deacon, setting before him the fear of God and compelling him to minister. He resisted strongly, protesting that he was unworthy. We barely compelled him and could persuade him by the testimonies of Scripture and by setting out God's commandments. And when he had ministered at the holy sacrifices, again with great difficulty, his mouth being held, we ordained him presbyter, and with the same words by which we had persuaded him before we urged him to sit in the rank of the presbytery. After this we wrote to the holy presbyters of the monastery and the other brothers and rebuked them for not having written about him, since a year before I had heard many of them complain that they had no one to celebrate the Lord's sacraments for them, and all of them asked for him by their testimony and declared that he would be of great use to the monastery in common; why, then, when the opportunity was found, had they not written to us or asked anything about his ordination?

These things were done as I have said, in the love of Christ, which I believed you had toward our littleness, although I ordained in the monastery and not in a parish subject to you. How truly blessed are the gentleness and goodness of the bishops of Cyprus, and how worthy of God's mercy is our rusticity, in your judgment and opinion! For many bishops of our communion have ordained presbyters in our province too, whom we had not been able to lay hold of, and have sent us deacons and subdeacons, whom we received with thanks. And I myself urged Philo, bishop of blessed memory, and the holy Theopropus to ordain presbyters for the churches of Cyprus that were near them but seemed to belong to the church of my own diocese, since it was a large and widely extended province, and so to provide for the church of Christ. But I have never ordained deaconesses and sent them to other provinces, nor done anything to divide the church. Why, then, have you thought fit to swell up so gravely and to rage against us for a work of God that was done for the building up of the brothers and not for their destruction? But I was greatly amazed at this too, that you told my clergy that you had sent word to me through the holy presbyter Gregory, abbot of the monks, not to ordain anyone, and that I had promised this, saying, 'Am I a youth, or ignorant of the canons?' Hear the truth, then, by the word of God: I neither heard this, nor knew of it, nor have any memory at all of such a conversation. But I suspected that perhaps, being human, I had forgotten it among many things, and for this reason I asked the holy Gregory and the presbyter Zeno who is with him. Of these, the abbot Gregory answered that he knew nothing whatever of it. Zeno said that when the presbyter Rufinus was speaking to him about something else in passing, he said this too: 'Do you think the holy bishop is going to ordain anyone?' and that the conversation stopped there. But I, Epiphanius, neither heard anything nor answered. Therefore, dearly beloved, let not rage overtake you nor indignation seize you, nor be moved in vain, and, grieving over something else, turn to other matters and seem to have found an occasion in sinning; which the prophet avoids when he prays to the Lord, saying: 'Do not turn my heart to words of malice, to make excuses in sins.'

I was amazed also to hear that certain people, who habitually carry little rumors back and forth and always add to what they have heard, in order to stir up sadness and quarrels among brothers, have disturbed you too, and told you that in our prayer, when we offer sacrifices to God, we usually say for you: 'Lord, grant to John that he may believe rightly.' Do not think us so rustic that we could have said this so openly. For though I always pray this in my heart, yet, to confess simply, I have never uttered it in the ears of others, lest I should seem to hold you cheap, dearly beloved. But when we complete the prayer according to the rite of the mysteries, we say both for all and for you too: 'Guard him who preaches the truth,' or at least thus: 'Grant, O Lord, and guard him, that he may preach the word of truth,' as the occasion of speech arises and the prayer has its sequence. Therefore I beseech you, dearly beloved, and falling at your feet I pray: grant to me and to yourself that you be saved, as it is written, from a perverse generation; and withdraw from the heresy of Origen and from all heresies, dearly beloved. For I see that all your indignation has been stirred up for this reason: that I told you, 'You ought not to praise the father of Arius and the root and parent of the other heresies.' And when I begged you not to err so, and warned you, you contradicted me and brought me to sadness and tears, and not me only but very many other catholics who were present. And, as I understand, this is the whole of your indignation and this rage, and this is why you threaten to send letters against me and to have your talk run hither and thither; and by stirring up hatred against me in defense of heresy you break the love we had for you, so far as to make us even repent of having communicated with you while you defend the errors and teachings of Origen in this way.

I will speak simply: as it is written, we do not spare even our own eye, but pluck it out if it causes us to stumble, nor our hand or foot if they cause us to stumble. And you, then, whether you are our eye or hand or foot, will suffer the same. For which catholic could bear with equanimity, among those who adorn their faith with good works, that people should hear the teaching and counsel of Origen and believe that splendid proclamation of his: 'The Son cannot see the Father, nor can the Holy Spirit see the Son'? This is written in the books On First Principles; we read it in these words, and Origen said as follows: 'For as it is incongruous to say that the Son can see the Father, so it is illogical to think that the Holy Spirit can see the Son.' Who, too, could endure Origen when he says that souls were angels in heaven and, after sinning on high, were cast down into this world and consigned to these bodies as to tombs and sepulchres, to pay the penalty of their former sins; and that the bodies of believers are not temples of Christ but prisons of the condemned? Then, corrupting the truth of history with the lie of allegory, he multiplies words without end and, tripping up all simple people with varied persuasion, asserts now that souls (psychai) are so called, according to Greek etymology, because in coming from the heavens to lower things they lost their former warmth; now that this body is called, according to the Greeks, demas, that is 'bond', or, according to another property, 'corpse', because souls fell from heaven; while most, according to the varied furniture of the Greek language, interpret body as sēma, that is 'monument', because it holds the soul shut up in itself as sepulchres and tombs hold the corpses of the dead. And if this is true, where is our faith? Where is the proclamation of the resurrection? Where is the apostolic teaching which endures in the churches of Christ to this day? Where is that blessing to Adam and his seed, and to Noah and his sons: 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth'? For according to Origen it will no longer be a blessing but a curse, since he turns angels into souls and makes them come down from the lofty height of their dignity to lower things, as though God could not give souls to the human race by his blessing unless the angels sinned, and there were as many falls in heaven as there are births on earth. We must abandon the teaching of the apostles and prophets and of the law, and of the Lord the Savior himself thundering in the Gospel; Origen, on the contrary, commands and lays down a law (not to say he binds his disciples) that no one should pray to ascend into heaven, lest, sinning again worse than he sinned before on earth, he be hurled down into the world. Such trifles and ravings he is accustomed to affirm by a perverse interpretation of the Scriptures, which signifies something other than the truth, citing: 'Before I was humbled by wickedness, I went astray,' and 'Return, my soul, to your rest,' and 'Bring my soul out of prison,' and in another place, 'I will confess to the Lord in the land of the living,' though the sense of divine Scripture is undoubtedly other than what he twists into his heresy by malicious interpretation. The same is done by the Manichaeans, the Gnostics, the Ebionites, the followers of Marcion, and the other heresies, eighty in number, who take testimonies from the purest spring of the Scriptures and do not interpret them as they are written, but want the simplicity of the church's language to signify what they themselves think.

As for what he also tries to assert, I do not know whether to grieve or laugh. The excellent teacher dares to teach that the devil will again be what he was, will return to the same dignity, and will ascend to the kingdom of heaven. What wickedness! Who is so mad and foolish as to accept that the holy John the Baptist, Peter, John the apostle and evangelist, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other prophets should become fellow heirs of the devil in the kingdom of heaven? I pass over his frivolous exposition of the coats of skins, with what effort and how many arguments he labored to make us believe that the coats of skins are human bodies. Among much else he says: 'Was God a tanner or a leatherworker, to prepare the skins of animals and sew coats of skins from them for Adam and Eve? It is clear, then,' he says, 'that he is speaking of our bodies.' If that is so, how do we read that before the coats of skins, and before the disobedience and the fall from paradise, Adam said, not allegorically but truly: 'This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh'? Or whence comes what the divine word testifies: 'And God cast a deep sleep upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs and filled up flesh in its place, and built the rib that he had taken from him into a wife for him'? Or what bodies did Adam and Eve cover with fig leaves after they ate of the forbidden tree? Who could patiently bear Origen denying the resurrection of this flesh with slippery arguments, as he declares most plainly in the volume of Explanations on the first psalm and in many other places? Or who would listen to Origen granting us paradise in the third heaven, transferring the one Scripture mentions from earth to the heavenly places, and understanding all the trees written of in Genesis allegorically, as if the trees were angelic powers, when the truth does not admit this? For the divine Scripture did not say, 'He put Adam and Eve down onto the earth,' but, 'He cast them out of paradise'; and, 'He made him dwell opposite paradise,' and not, 'He cast them down beneath paradise'; and, 'He placed a flaming sword and the cherubim to guard the entrance to the tree of life,' and not 'the ascent'; and, 'A river goes out from Eden'; it did not say, 'comes down from Eden.' 'It divides into four heads: the name of one is Pishon and the name of the second Gihon.' I myself, I have seen the waters of Gihon, waters that I beheld with these eyes of flesh. This is the Gihon that Jeremiah points to, saying: 'What have you to do with the way of Egypt, to drink the muddy water of Gihon?' I have drunk plainly from the great river Euphrates too, waters that I could touch with my hand and sip with my mouth, not spiritual waters. And where there are rivers and waters that are seen and drunk, it follows that the fig and the other trees, of which God says, 'Of every tree that is in paradise you shall eat,' are like the rivers and waters. And if the water that is seen is truly water, the fig must be real too, and the other trees, and Adam real, formed from the beginning in a body, as was Eve, and not in a phantom, and not receiving a body afterwards, after the fall, on account of sin, as Origen will have it. But you say: 'We read that the holy Paul was caught up to the third heaven and into paradise.' Well said: when he sets down 'the third heaven' and afterwards adds 'and into paradise,' he shows that heaven is in one place and paradise in another. And who would not at once reject and despise those conjuring tricks, when Origen says of the waters above the firmament that they are not waters but certain powers of angelic might, and again that the waters on the earth, that is, below the firmament, are the opposing powers, that is, demons? Then how do we read that in the flood the floodgates of heaven were opened and the waters of the flood poured forth, whence the fountains of the abyss were opened and the whole world was covered with waters?

Alas for the madness of men joined to folly! They have left what is said in Proverbs, 'Hear, my son, your father's words, and do not reject your mother's law,' and have turned to error; they tell the fool to be his own leader and do not despise the foolish things said by a fool, as Scripture testifies: 'The fool speaks foolish things, and his heart understands vain things.' Therefore I beseech you, dearly beloved, and, sparing you as my own members out of the love I have for you, I pray, writing and praying, that you fulfil what is said: 'Did I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and waste away over your enemies?' The words of Origen are hostile and worthy of hatred, opposed to God and to his saints; and not only these I have mentioned but countless others, for it is not my purpose now to dispute against all Origen's doctrines. Origen took nothing from me, nor was he of my generation, nor did I take up hatred and battles against him for any worldly matters or an inheritance; but, to confess simply, I grieve, and grieve deeply, seeing very many of the brothers, especially those who hold no small profession and have even reached the highest rank of the priesthood, deceived by his persuasion and made food for the devil by his most perverse teaching. In them is fulfilled what is said: 'He will mock every fortress, and his food is choice, and he will gather captives like sand.' But may God deliver you, brother, 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 from other heresies and their perdition. For if many heresies have been cast out of the church for one or two words contrary to the faith, how much more will this man be counted among the heretics, who invented so many perversities and such bad doctrines against the faith and has shown himself an enemy of God and of the church! Among many evils he dared to say this too, that Adam lost the image of God, though Scripture nowhere at all indicates this. For if it were so, everything in the world would never serve the seed of Adam, that is, the whole human race, as the apostle James also says: 'All things are tamed and made subject to human nature.' For all things would never have been subject to men unless men had the image of God, by which they rule all things. And the divine Scripture, joining and associating the grace of blessing that it had given to Adam with the generations that came from him, lest anyone should perhaps dare by malicious interpretation to say that God's grace was given to one man, and that only he who was formed from the soil, and his wife, were made in the image of God, while those conceived in the womb and not born as Adam was do not have the image of God, at once adds in order: 'And Adam lived two hundred and thirty years and knew Eve his wife, and she bore him a son according to his form and according to his image, and he called his name Seth.' And again, in the tenth generation, after two thousand two hundred and sixty-two years, God, vindicating his image and showing that the grace he had given to men remained in them, says: 'You shall not eat flesh with the blood; for I will avenge your blood at the hand of every man who sheds it, because I made man in the image of God.' And after another ten generations until Abraham, and from Abraham to David another fourteen generations, which twenty-four generations together make … years, the Holy Spirit in the thirty-eighth psalm, complaining of all men that they walked in vanity and were subject to sins, says: 'Nevertheless every man walks in the image.' And after David, under Solomon his son, we read something similar named concerning the image of God. For he says in the Wisdom written under his name: 'He created man incorruptible and gave him the image of his own nature.' And again, after about one thousand one hundred and eleven years, we read in the New Testament that men have not lost the image of God. For James, the apostle and brother of the Lord, whom we mentioned above, teaches us, lest we be caught in Origen's snares, that man has the image and likeness of God. For after discussing the human tongue at some length he added: 'An unstable evil: with it we bless God and the Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God.' Paul too, the chosen vessel, who completed the Gospel teaching by his preaching, teaches us that man was made in the image and likeness of God, saying: 'A man ought not to grow long hair, since he is the glory and image of God,' calling the image simply by its own name and indicating the likeness by the word 'glory.'

So in place of the three testimonies which you said would suffice for you if I found them in holy Scripture, see, we have given seven. Who then will bear Origen's absurdities? I will not say anything harsher, and become like him or his disciples, who dare, at the peril of their souls, to assert whatever comes into their mouths, and would rather give orders to God than pray to him or learn the truth from him. For some of them say that the image which Adam first received perished when he sinned; others suppose that the body which the Son of God was to have from Mary is itself the image; others say it is the mind, others virtue, some baptism, others that man is in the image of God in that he rules over all things; belching out this or that like drunkards. They ought only to have fled the danger, not denied what God says, and, believing simply, to be saved, and to leave to God the sure and true knowledge of his gift, in what part above all he made men in his image and likeness. Leaving this, they have entangled themselves in many questions, and through them have been plunged into the mire of sins. But we, dearly beloved, believe what the Lord has spoken, and we know that the image of God remains in all men, and we leave it to him to know in what part man was made in the image of God. Nor let anyone be deceived by what some who read it in John's epistle do not understand, where he says: 'Now we are children of God, and we do not know what we shall be. But we know that when he is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.' This is said because of the glory that is to be revealed there to his saints, as we also read in another place, 'from glory to glory.' Of this glory the saints have already received a pledge and a small portion in this age: first Moses, whose face shone greatly and gleamed like lightning or the sun; second Elijah, caught up into heaven in a fiery chariot and feeling no harm from the fire; Stephen was being stoned and had the face of an angel, which was seen by all. And what we have said of a few must be understood of all, so that what is written may be fulfilled: 'Everyone who sanctifies himself will be numbered among the blessed.' For 'blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'

Since this is how matters stand, dearly beloved, guard your soul and stop murmuring about us; for the divine Scripture says: 'Do not murmur against one another, as some murmured and perished by the serpents.' Rather yield to the truth, and love those who love you and the truth. May the God of peace, according to his mercy, grant us that Satan be crushed under the feet of Christians and every perverse occasion be cast away, so that the bond of love and peace and the preaching of the right faith may not be torn among us.

Moreover, since I have heard that certain people are murmuring against me: when we were going together to the holy place called Bethel, so that I might hold the service there with you according to the custom of the church, and I had come to a village called Anablatha, and, seeing a lamp burning there as I passed, had asked what the place was and learned that it was a church, and had gone in to pray, I found there a curtain hanging at the doors of that church, dyed and painted, with an image as it were of Christ or of some saint; I do not remember well whose image it was. When, then, I saw this, that the image of a man was hanging in the church of Christ contrary to the authority of the Scriptures, I tore it and advised the custodians of the place rather to wrap a poor dead man in it and bury him. But they murmured in reply, saying: 'If he wanted to tear it, it was only right that he should give another curtain and replace it!' When I heard this, I promised that I would give one and send it at once. There has been a little delay in the meantime, while I sought to send an excellent curtain in its place, for I thought I should have to send for one from Cyprus. Now I have sent what I could find, and I ask you to order the presbyter of that place to receive from the reader the curtain we have sent, and to command that in future curtains of this kind, which are contrary to our religion, are not to be hung in the church of Christ. For it befits your honor rather to have this concern and to use a scrupulousness worthy of the church of Christ and of the peoples entrusted to you. As for Palladius the Galatian, who was once dear to us and now needs the mercy of God, beware of him, for he preaches and teaches the heresy of Origen, lest perhaps he lead some of the people entrusted to you into the perversity of his error.