Letters 82.1–83.2

Your letter shows you to be the possessor of the Lord's inheritance, who, going to the Father, said to the apostles, 'My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you'; and it proves you a sharer in that blessedness in which the peacemakers are called blessed. You coax like a father, teach like a master, instruct like a bishop. You come to us not with the severity of the rod but in the spirit of gentleness and meekness, so as to sound forth at once, in your first words, the humility of Christ, who saved mortal men not by lightning and thunder, but crying in a manger and lying on a cross. For you had read what was foretold of him in a type, 'Remember, Lord, David and all his meekness,' and what was afterwards shown in himself, 'Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart.' So, touching on many passages from the sacred books in praise of peace, flying like a bee over the fields of the Scriptures, you have reaped with skilful eloquence whatever was sweet and fitted to concord. We were already running toward peace and have been urged on; the frequent breeze of your exhortation has filled the sails set for the voyage, so that we drink the sweet streams of peace not with reluctant and fastidious, but with eager and full throats.

But what are we to do, who have in our power only the will for peace, not its accomplishment? And although the will too has its reward with God for its intention, yet unfinished work saddens with grief even those who will it. The apostle knew this, that the most perfect peace lies in the will of both parties, and says: 'As far as it depends on you, have peace with all men.' And the prophet: 'Peace, peace; and where is peace?' For it is no great thing to hold out peace with the voice and destroy it by deed, to strive for one thing and show another, to sound concord in words and in fact demand servitude. We too want peace; and not only do we want it, we ask for it; but the peace of Christ, true peace, peace without enmities, peace in which war is not wrapped up, peace that does not subdue adversaries but joins them as friends. Why do we call domination peace, and not give each thing its own name? Where there is hatred, let it be called enmity; only where there is love is it called peace. We do not split the church nor are we separated from the communion of the fathers; from our very cradle, so to speak, we have been fed on catholic milk. For no one is more a man of the church than he who has never been a heretic. But we do not know peace without love, nor communion without peace; and we read in the gospel: 'If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother; and then come and offer your gift.' If we cannot offer our gifts without peace, how much less can we receive the body of Christ! With what conscience shall I come to the Eucharist of Christ and answer Amen, when I doubt the love of him who offers it?

I beg you to hear me patiently and not to think truth flattery. Does anyone communicate with you unwillingly? Does anyone, with hand stretched out, turn away his face and at the sacred banquet offer a Judas kiss? At your arrival, I think, the crowd of monks does not tremble but rejoices, when they vie to come out to meet you, and, leaving the hiding places of the desert, seek to outdo you in humility. Who compels them to come out? Is it not love of you? Who gathers into one those scattered through the desert? Is it not your affection? For a parent ought to be loved, a parent and a bishop loved, not feared. There is an old saying: whom a man fears, he hates; whom he hates, he wishes dead. So in our Scriptures too, while the beginnings of little ones consist in fear, perfect love casts out fear. You do not seek to have the monks subject to you, and therefore you have them more subject. You offer a kiss, they bow their necks; you show yourself a soldier and win a general's place; you are as one among many, so as to be one above many. Freedom quickly grows indignant if it is oppressed by force; no one commands a free man more than he who does not force him to serve. We know the canons of the church; we are not ignorant of the ranks of each; by reading and by daily examples, up to this age, we have learned much and experienced much. He who beats with scorpions and thinks his little finger thicker than his father's loins quickly breaks up the kingdom of the meek David. Certainly the Roman people did not bear pride even in a king. That leader of the army of Israel, who had afflicted Egypt with ten plagues, and at whose command heaven, earth, and seas served, is proclaimed the meekest of all men whom the earth then produced; and so he held the leadership for forty years, because he tempered the pride of power with gentleness and meekness. He is stoned by the people, and he prays for those who stone him; indeed he wishes to be blotted out of God's book, lest the flock entrusted to him should perish. For he longed to imitate that shepherd whom he knew would carry even the straying sheep on his shoulders. 'The good shepherd,' he says, 'lays down his life for his sheep.' And the disciple of the good shepherd wishes to be accursed for his brothers and kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites. And if he desires to perish, so that the lost may not perish, how much more must good parents take care not to provoke their children to anger, and by excessive harshness force even the gentlest to become hard!

The letter forces me to speak more briefly; grief, at greater length. He writes in that letter of his, peaceable as he means it, most biting as I feel it, that he has never been hurt by me nor called a heretic. And how is it that he hurts me, spreading it abroad that I am sick with a most evil disease and a rebel against the church? Provoked by others, he accuses another; and, when I am keeping silent by the wisest counsel, he forces me to speak, showing that he spares his adversaries and hurts one who does not hurt him. He says that before my brother was ordained there was no question of doctrine between himself and the holy father Epiphanius. Then what reason compelled him, as he himself writes, to discuss before the people matters about which no one was asking? For your prudence knows that questions of this kind are dangerous, and that nothing is safer (unless perhaps it is necessary to speak) than to be silent about great matters. Surely, what was that great genius and river of eloquence, that he says he covered in one sermon in church all the subjects on each of which we know most learned men have written countless thousands of lines? But what is that to me? Let him who heard it know, let him who wrote it know: he himself frees me from the charge of accusing him. I was not present and did not hear; I am one of the people, or rather not even one, since I kept silent while many were crying out. Let us compare the persons of the accuser and the accused, and give our belief rather to the one whose merit, life, or teaching stands first.

Do you see how, with my eyes shut, as the saying goes, I touch only on the heads of the matter, not so much speaking out what I have conceived in my mind as showing what I leave unsaid? I have understood and approved your prudent management, that, consulting the peace of the church, you pass by as though with stopped ears the Sirens' songs. Otherwise, you who have been trained in the sacred writings from an early age know in what sense each thing is said, and how speech, balanced between ambiguous meanings, may neither condemn another's views nor deny its own. But pure faith and open confession do not seek tricks and verbal arguments. What is believed simply must be confessed simply. I could indeed cry out freely, and even among the swords and fires of Babylon say: 'Why is one thing asked and another answered? Why is there no simple and open confession?' He fears everything, qualifies everything, leaves everything ambiguous, and walks as though on ears of corn. But in my eagerness and expectation of peace I do not suit my words to a boiling temper. Let others complain freely, whom he, though hurt, does not dare to hurt; I will keep silent for now, and pretend that my prudence is either ignorance or fear. For what will he do to me if I accuse him, who, as he himself testifies, disparages me when I praise him?

His whole letter is full, not so much of an exposition of faith, as of insults to us. My name is taken up again and again without any of the courtesies with which we men usually soothe one another; it is picked at and tossed about, as though I should be blotted out of the book of the living if his letter bruised me, or as though I had ever sought such trifles, I who from my youth, shut up in the cell of a monastery, have wished rather to be something than to seem it. Some of us he names with such respect as to tear them apart, as if we too could not say what no one keeps quiet about. He charges us with having made a cleric out of a slave, when he himself has some clerics of the same condition, and he has read that Onesimus, reborn in Paul's chains, began to be a deacon instead of a slave. He keeps calling him an informer, and, so as not to have to prove it, says he has heard it. O if I too chose to say what many are shouting and to give credit to the evil tales of others: he would soon understand that we also know what everyone knows, and that I hear what no one is ignorant of. He says that ordination was given him as a kind of reward for his false accusation. Who would not shudder at so shrewd and cunning a mind? Who could answer so great a river of eloquence? Which is worse: to suffer a false accusation or to make one; to accuse someone you afterwards love, or to grant pardon to a sinner? Which is less tolerable: for an informer to become an aedile or a consul? He himself knows what I keep silent about and what I say, what I too have heard, and what, for fear of Christ, perhaps I do not believe.

He accuses me of having translated Origen into Latin. Not only I did this, but the confessor Hilary too; and yet each of us cut away everything harmful and translated what was useful. Let him read them himself, if he knows how (for I think that by constant conversation and daily association with Latins he is not ignorant of the Roman tongue); or, if he has not quite taken it in, let those who usually do so interpret for him, and then he will know that I deserve praise for the very thing for which he disparages me. For while I have always granted Origen his skill in interpretation and in commentaries on the Scriptures, I have most consistently denied the truth of his doctrines. Is it I who let Origen loose on the crowd? Do I pair him with other commentators, and not say that I regard the apostles one way and the other commentators another: that the apostles always speak the truth, while the others, being men, go astray in some things? It is a new kind of defence not to deny Origen's faults, but to accuse others along with him, so that the man you do not dare to defend openly you may protect by the similar error of many. As for the six thousand volumes of Origen, no one could have read what he did not write; and I think it more likely that the witness of this saying has lied than its author.

He says my brother is the cause of the discord, a man who lives quietly in the cell of a monastery and understands the clerical office as a burden, not an honour. And though up to this day he has been lulling us with a pretended show of peace, he has disturbed the ears of the Western bishops by saying that my brother, a young man and almost a boy, was made a presbyter in his parish of Bethlehem. If this is true, all the bishops of Palestine know it. For the monastery of the holy father Epiphanius, in which my brother was ordained presbyter, is situated in the territory of Eleutheropolis and not in that of Aelia. Further, his age is known to your Blessedness too; and since he has reached thirty years, I think it cannot be blamed in this, an age made perfect by the mystery of the manhood assumed in Christ. Let him remember the ancient law, and he will see that Levites were chosen for the priesthood after twenty-five years; or, if in this one text he follows the Hebrew truth, he will know that priests are made at thirty. And lest he perhaps say, 'The old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new,' let him hear with Timothy, 'Let no one despise your youth.' Certainly he himself, when he was ordained bishop, was not much different in age from my brother now. Or if this is allowed in bishops but not in presbyters, lest by antiphrasis they seem at odds with their own name, why did he himself ordain as presbyter a man of the same age or younger, and, what is more, the minister of another church? But if he cannot have peace with my brother except as a subject who repudiates the bishop who ordained him, he shows that he desires not so much peace as vengeance under the pretext of peace, and is not content with another's quiet and leisure so long as he cannot carry out in full what he threatens. Even if he himself had ordained him, and my brother, a lover of seclusion, wished to live quietly and exercised no function that would split the church, he would owe him nothing but the honour due to all priests.

So far his apology, or rather his accusation, and the long-winded speech drawn out against us. I have answered him in a letter briefly and in passing, so that from what I have said he may understand what I have left unsaid, and know that we men are rational animals and can understand his prudence, and are not so dull of heart that, like brute beasts, we hear only the sound of words and not their meaning. But now I ask you to pardon my grief; and if it is proud to have answered, let it be much prouder to have accused. Yet I have answered in such a way as to show my silence rather than my speech. Why do they seek peace from far away and want it imposed on us by others? Let them be peaceable, and peace will follow at once. Why do they misuse the name of your Holiness against us as a threat, and, while your letter sounds of peace and gentleness, their words threaten harshness? Finally, we prove how peaceable and conducive to concord was the letter you sent us by the presbyter Isidore from this: those who boast that they want peace refused to deliver it. Let them choose, then, what they wish: we are either good or bad. If good, let them leave us in peace; if bad, why do they seek the company of the bad? He who now pretends otherwise has learned by experience how much humility avails. He who by his own counsel once joined together what was separated shows that now, at another's will, he tears apart what was united.

Recently he asked for and obtained our exile. Would that he had been able to carry it out, so that, as the will is counted to him for the deed, we too might have the crown of exile not only in will but in fact! The church was founded by shedding blood and by suffering insults rather than by inflicting them. It grew by persecutions and was crowned by martyrdoms. Or if these men alone, among whom we live, love severity and know how not to endure persecution but to inflict it, there are Jews here too, there are heretics of various doctrines, and especially the most impure Manichees: why do they not dare to hurt any of them even by a word, but desire to expel us alone? Are we alone, who are in communion with the church, said to split the church? I ask you, is it not a fair demand that they either expel those people along with us or keep us along with them? Except that in this they honour us the more, that at least by exile they separate us from the heretics. A monk (alas!) threatens and brings exile upon monks, and this a monk who boasts that he holds an apostolic see. This race of men does not know how to yield to terror, and to the hanging sword it offers its neck rather than its hands. For what monk, exiled from his country, is not an exile from the world? What need is there of public authority, the expense of rescripts, and running over the whole world? Let him touch us with his little finger, and we will leave of our own accord. 'The earth is the Lord's and its fullness.' Christ is not shut up in one place.

Further, as to his writing that through you and the Roman church we are in communion with him, from whom we seem to be separated at close quarters: there is no need to go so far. Here in Palestine too we are joined with him in the same way; and (lest even this be far off) in the little village of Bethlehem we are united in communion with his presbyters, as far as in us lies. From this it is clear that a personal grievance should not be thought the cause of the church, nor should the temper of one man, or rather of others through him, be called by the general name of the church. So what I said at the beginning of my letter I now repeat: we want the peace of Christ, we desire true concord, and we ask you to advise him not to extort peace but to want it. Let him be content with the past grief of our insults; let him at least blot out old wounds with new charity. Let him be such as he was before, when he loved us of his own free will. Let his words not flow from another's temper; let him do what he wishes, and not what he is compelled to wish. Let him either, as a bishop, command all equally, or, as an imitator of the apostle, serve the salvation of all alike. If he shows himself such, we willingly offer our hands and stretch out our arms; let him have friends and kinsmen, and let him feel that in Christ we are subject to him as to all the saints. 'Love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous, is not puffed up, bears all things, believes all things.' Love is the mother of all the virtues, and like a threefold cord it is strengthened by the apostle's saying: 'faith, hope, love.' We believe and we hope; and so through faith and hope we are joined by the bond of love. For this reason we too left our homelands, to live quietly without any feuds in the fields and in solitude; to venerate the bishops of Christ (those, that is, who preach the right faith) not from fear of masters but with the honour due to fathers; to defer to bishops as bishops, and not to be forced, under the name of one, to serve others whom we do not wish to serve. We are not so puffed up in heart as not to know what is due to the priests of Christ. For he who receives them receives not so much them as him whose bishops they are. But let them be content with their honour, and know that they are fathers, not lords, especially among those who, scorning the ambitions of the world, put nothing before quiet and leisure. May Christ, God almighty, grant to your prayers that we may be united in peace, not in a feigned name but in true and faithful love, lest, biting one another, we be consumed by one another.

Pammachius and Oceanus to the presbyter Jerome, greeting. One of the holy brothers brought us some sheets of a certain person's, which contained a volume by Origen, called Peri Archon, translated into Latin. And since there are many things in them that disturb our slender understanding, which we judge to have been said in a way that is not catholic, and since we also suspect that, to excuse the author, much has been removed from his books which could have shown his open impiety, we ask your excellence to be good enough to undertake a work that will benefit especially not so much us as all who live in the city: to make the aforesaid book of Origen known in your own words faithfully, as it was published by the author himself, to reveal what has been interpolated by his defender, and to refute and disprove what is said in these sheets, which we have sent to your Holiness, either against the catholic rule or ignorantly.

He has indeed subtly mentioned your Holiness in the preface of his work, without naming you, as though he were completing a work you had promised, obliquely suggesting that you too hold similar views. So clear away men's suspicions and refute your accuser, lest, if you ignore it, you seem to have agreed.