Letters 84.1–89.2

The sheets you sent have honoured me with an insult, praising my talent in such a way as to take away the truth of my faith. Since good men at Alexandria and Rome and in almost the whole world are accustomed to boast the same things about my name, and love me so much that they cannot be heretics without me, I will leave persons aside and answer only the matters and the charges. For it does not help the cause of one who is commanded not to return evil for evil but to overcome evil with good, to be filled with reproaches, and to offer the other cheek to one who strikes, to curse back those who curse and to bite adversaries in retaliation.

They charge me with having once praised Origen. If I am not mistaken, there are two places: the little preface to Damasus on the homilies on the Song of Songs, and the prologue to the Book of Hebrew Names. What is said there about the doctrines of the church? What about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? What about the resurrection of the flesh? What about the state and substance of the soul? His simple interpretation and teaching were praised in simple words. Nothing about faith, nothing about doctrines was included there. Only moral matters are treated, and the cloud of allegory is dispelled by clear exposition. I praised the interpreter, not the dogmatist; the talent, not the faith; the philosopher, not the apostle. If they want to know my judgement on Origen, let them read my commentaries on Ecclesiastes, let them unroll the three volumes on the Letter to the Ephesians, and they will understand that I have always opposed his doctrines. For what folly is it to praise someone's learning in such a way as to follow his blasphemy too? The blessed Cyprian uses Tertullian as his master, as his writings show; and though he delights in the talent of that learned and ardent man, he does not follow him into Montanus and Maximilla. Apollinaris wrote most powerful books against Porphyry; Eusebius composed a fine church history; yet one of them introduces a halved economy of Christ, and the other is a most open champion of the impiety of Arius. 'Woe,' says Isaiah, 'to those who call good evil and evil good, who make bitter sweet and sweet bitter.' We must neither disparage the good in our adversaries, if they have anything honourable, nor praise the faults of our friends; each thing must be judged by the weight not of persons but of facts. Lucilius too is criticized for running on a clumsy foot, and yet his wit and charm are praised.

When I was young I was carried away by a wonderful passion for learning, and I did not, as some presume to do, teach myself. At Antioch I often heard Apollinaris of Laodicea and attended him; and though he instructed me in the holy Scriptures, I never accepted his contentious doctrine about the mind. My head was already sprinkled with grey hairs and the part of a master suited me better than that of a pupil; yet I went on to Alexandria and heard Didymus. I thank him for many things. What I did not know I learned; what I knew I did not lose when he taught differently. People thought I had made an end of learning; yet again at Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with what labour and at what price I had Baraninas as my teacher by night! For he feared the Jews, and showed himself to me as another Nicodemus. I often mention all these in my works. Certainly the doctrines of Apollinaris and Didymus are opposed to each other; so let each troop drag me to its side, since I confess each as my master. If it is right to hate men and to detest any race, I turn from the circumcised with a remarkable hatred; for to this day they persecute our Lord Jesus Christ in the synagogues of Satan. Yet let someone object to me that I had a Jew as teacher! And a certain person dares to bring forward my letter to Didymus as to a master. A great crime in a pupil, if I called a learned old man master! And yet I should like to see that letter, kept so long for slander: it contains nothing but courtesy and greeting. These things are silly and frivolous. Show rather where I have defended heresy, where I have praised a perverse doctrine of Origen. In the passage of Isaiah in which the two seraphim are described crying out, when he interpreted them as the Son and the Holy Spirit, did I not change that detestable exposition into the two Testaments? The book is in people's hands, published twenty years ago. All my works, and especially my commentaries, tear at the Gentile sect as occasion arises. As for their objection that I have collected his books beyond all men, would that I had the volumes of all commentators, to make up for the slowness of my wit by diligent reading! I have collected his books, I confess; and I do not follow his errors precisely because I know all that he wrote. Believe one who has tried it; I speak as a Christian to Christians: his doctrines are poisoned, foreign to the holy Scriptures, doing violence to the Scriptures. I have read Origen, I say, I have read him; and if there is a crime in reading, I confess it (and Alexandrian papyrus has emptied my purse). If you believe me, I have never been an Origenist; if you do not believe me, I have now ceased to be one. But if even so you are not brought to believe, you compel me to write against your darling in my own defence, so that, if you do not believe me when I deny, you may at least believe me when I accuse. But I am more readily believed when I err than when I am corrected. No wonder; for they think I am their fellow-initiate, and unwilling to profess their doctrines openly because of the 'animal' and 'clay' men. For it is their decree that pearls are not easily to be cast before swine, nor what is holy given to dogs; and to say with David, 'I have hidden your words in my heart, that I may not sin against you'; and in another place, of the just man, 'who speaks truth with his neighbour,' that is, with those of the household of faith. From this they would have it understood that we who are not yet initiated ought to hear falsehood, lest, being little ones still at the breast, we be choked by a meal of more solid food. That they are bound together by the rites of perjury and lying, the sixth book of the Stromateis, in which he harmonizes our doctrine with the views of Plato, most plainly teaches.

What then shall I do? Deny that I hold the same doctrine? They will not believe. Swear it? They will laugh and say, 'We grow such things at home.' I will do the one thing they guard against: I will bring their sacred rites and mysteries into public, and all the cunning with which they fool us simple people will be laid open, so that those who do not believe a voice that denies may at least believe a pen that accuses. For this above all they guard against, that their writings should ever be held against their author. They easily say something on oath, which they afterwards undo by another perjury; at signing, they shuffle and look for loopholes. One says, 'I cannot condemn what no one has condemned'; another, 'The fathers have laid down nothing on this,' so that, by appealing to the authority of the whole world, the necessity of signing may be put off; some more boldly say, 'How shall we condemn what the Nicene synod did not touch? For the synod that condemned Arius would surely have condemned Origen too, if it had rejected his doctrines.' As if they ought to have cured all diseases at once with one medicine! By that reasoning the majesty of the Holy Spirit must be denied, because that synod was silent about his substance. The question then was about Arius, not Origen; about the Son, not the Holy Spirit. They confessed what was being denied; they were silent about what no one was asking. Yet by implication they struck Origen too, the source of Arius; for in condemning those who deny that the Son is of the Father's substance, they condemned him and Arius alike. Otherwise, by this argument, neither Valentinus nor Marcion nor the Cataphrygians nor Manichaeus should be condemned, since the Nicene synod does not name them; and there is no doubt that they existed before the synod. But if they ever begin to be pressed, and must either sign or leave the churches, you should see their wonderful tricks. They so balance their words, so reverse the order, and so contrive ambiguities, that they hold both our confession and our adversaries', so that the heretic hears one thing and the catholic another: just as if the Delphic Apollo, Loxias, had not given his oracles to Croesus and to Pyrrhus at different times in the same spirit, mocking with the same trick.

I will give an example. 'We believe,' they say, 'that there will be a resurrection of bodies.' If this is meant well, it is a pure confession. But since there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, and the air and a thin breeze are called bodies according to their nature, they say 'body', not 'flesh', so that the orthodox, hearing 'body', may think of flesh, while the heretic recognizes spirit. This is their first snare. If it is detected, they lay other traps, feign innocence, call us malicious, and, as if believing simply, say, 'We believe in the resurrection of the flesh.' When they have said this, the unlearned crowd thinks it enough, especially since this very thing is believed in the creed. Ask further, and the circle is set buzzing; their supporters shout, 'You have heard the resurrection of the flesh; what more do you want?' And with the sympathies turned upside down, we are called slanderers and they simple men. But if you harden your forehead and begin to press, holding the flesh in your fingers, asking whether they say that this very flesh rises, which is seen, which is touched, which walks and speaks, first they laugh, then they nod. And when we ask whether the resurrection will present hair and teeth, chest and belly, hands and feet and the other limbs entire, then indeed they cannot contain themselves, and breaking into laughter they tell us we shall need barbers, cakes, doctors, and cobblers, and ask in turn whether we believe that the genitals of both sexes will rise, that our cheeks will be bearded and women's smooth, and that the build of the body will differ according to the distinction of male and female. If we grant this, they at once bring up the womb and intercourse and the other things in and below the belly. They deny each limb, and say that the body, which is made of limbs, rises.

This is not the time to hurl rhetorical speech against a perverse doctrine. The rich tongue of Cicero would not suffice me, nor could the fervent oratory of Demosthenes fill the fervour of my mind, if I wished to expose the frauds of the heretics, who confess the resurrection in word but deny it in mind. For their silly women are accustomed to take hold of their breasts, pat their bellies, touch their loins and thighs and smooth cheeks, and say, 'What good is it to us if this frail body rises? We shall be like the angels and have the nature of angels.' They scorn, you see, to rise with flesh and bones, with which Christ too rose. But suppose I erred in my youth, and, trained in the studies of the philosophers, that is, the Gentiles, I did not know the Christian doctrines at the beginning of my faith and thought that in the apostles which I had read in Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles: why do you follow the error of a little one in Christ, still at the breast? Why do you learn impiety from one who did not yet know piety? The second plank after shipwreck is to confess one's fault simply. You imitated me when I erred; imitate me now I am corrected. We erred as young men; let us amend as old men. Let us join our groans, mingle our tears, weep and turn to the Lord who made us. Let us not wait for the devil's repentance; that presumption is vain and drags down into the depths of hell. Here life is either sought or lost. If I never followed Origen, you are wrong to try to defame me; if I was his disciple, imitate the penitent. You believed me when I confessed; believe me also when I deny.

'If you knew this,' someone says, 'why did you praise him in your works?' I would praise him today, if you did not praise his errors; his talent would not displease me, if his impiety did not please certain people. The apostle too commands: 'Reading all things, holding fast what is good.' Lactantius, in his books and especially in his letters to Demetrianus, altogether denies the substance of the Holy Spirit, and in a Jewish error says that he is to be referred to the Father or to the Son, and that the sanctification of both persons is shown under his name. Who can forbid me to read his books of Institutes, which he wrote most powerfully against the Gentiles, because the former opinion is to be detested? Apollinaris writes excellent volumes against Porphyry: I approve the man's labour, though I scorn his foolish doctrine in many things. Confess, you too, that Origen erred in some things, and I will not say a word. Say that he thought badly of the Son, worse of the Holy Spirit, that he impiously put forward the fall of souls from heaven, that he confesses the resurrection of the flesh in word only but destroys it by his assertions, and that after many ages and one restoration of all things Gabriel will be the same as the devil, Paul the same as Caiaphas, virgins the same as prostitutes. When you have rejected this and, as with a censor's rod, separated it from the faith of the church, I will read the rest safely and no longer fear poisons, having drunk the antidote beforehand. It will not harm me if I say, 'Origen, while he surpassed everyone in his other books, surpassed himself in the Song of Songs'; nor shall I fear the sentence in which, as a young man, I once called him a teacher of the churches. Unless perhaps I ought to have accused the man whose works I was translating at request, and said in the prologue, 'This man whose books I translate is a heretic; beware, reader, do not read him; flee the viper; or, if you wish to read, know that what I have translated was corrupted by wicked men and heretics. Yet you need not fear; for I have corrected everything that was corrupted.' That is to say in other words: 'I, the translator, am a catholic; he whom I translate is a heretic.' And you, in all simplicity and frankness and without malice (thinking little, of course, of the rules of rhetoric and the tricks of orators), by confessing that his books Peri Archon are heretical and wishing to shift the charge to others, have put a scruple into readers, so that they examine the author's whole life and form a conjecture about the present question from his other books. I was cunning, they say, because I silently corrected what I wished and, concealing the crimes, did not make the criminal odious. Physicians too say that great diseases should not be treated but left to nature, lest the cure aggravate the illness. It is nearly a hundred and fifty years since Origen fell asleep at Tyre. Which of the Latins ever dared to translate his books On the Resurrection, Peri Archon, or the Stromateis? Who wished to disgrace himself by a disgraceful work? We are not more eloquent than Hilary nor more faithful than Victorinus, who translated his treatises not as translators but as authors of their own works. Recently Ambrose so compiled Origen's Hexaemeron that he followed rather the views of Hippolytus and Basil. I myself, whose rivals you say you are, and who, moles as you are toward others, have the eyes of goats toward me, had I been ill-disposed to Origen, would have translated these very books I mentioned above, so as to make his evils known to the Latins too; but I never did so, and refused to consent though many asked. For I am not accustomed to insult the errors of those whose talents I admire. Origen himself, if he were alive, would be angry with you, his supporters, and say with Jacob, 'You have made me odious in the world.'

Does someone want to praise Origen? Let him praise him as I do. He was a great man from childhood, truly the son of a martyr. At Alexandria he held the church's school, succeeding that most learned man, the presbyter Clement. He fled pleasures so far that, with zeal for God but not according to knowledge, he cut off his genitals with a knife. He trampled on avarice. He knew the Scriptures by heart and laboured day and night in the study of their explanation. He published a thousand and more treatises which he spoke in church, and besides these innumerable commentaries, which he himself calls tomes, which I pass over now lest I seem to be compiling a catalogue of his works. Which of us can read as much as he wrote? Who would not admire his soul burning for the Scriptures? And if some Judas the zealot sets his errors against us, let him hear freely: 'Sometimes even great Homer nods; but in a long work it is right to pardon sleep.'

Let us not imitate the faults of one whose virtues we cannot follow. Others too, both Greek and Latin, have erred in the faith, whose names there is no need to bring forward, lest we seem to defend him not by his own merit but by the error of others. 'This is not excusing Origen,' you will say, 'but accusing others.' That would be fine if I were saying he had not erred, if in perversity of faith I thought one should listen even to the apostle Paul or an angel from heaven. But as it is, since I plainly admit his error, I will read him as I read the others, because he erred as the others did. You may say, 'If the error is common to many, why do you persecute him alone?' Because you alone praise him like an apostle. Take away the excess of love, and we will take away the greatness of hatred. You pick out the faults of the others from their books only to defend his error; you raise Origen to heaven so as to say that he never erred. Whoever you are who assert new doctrines, I beg you to spare Roman ears, to spare the faith that was praised by the apostle's voice. Why after four hundred years do you try to teach us what we did not know before? Why do you bring into the open what Paul and Peter chose not to publish? Up to this day the Christian world has been without this doctrine. As an old man I will hold that faith in which I was reborn as a boy. They call us Pelusiots, men of clay, animal and carnal, because we do not receive the things of the Spirit; they, of course, are Jerusalemites, whose mother is in heaven. I do not despise the flesh, in which Christ was born and rose again; I do not scorn the clay which, baked into the purest earthenware, reigns in heaven; and yet I wonder why those who disparage the flesh live carnally and cherish and delicately nourish their enemy, unless perhaps they wish to fulfil the Scripture that says, 'Love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you.' I love the flesh that is chaste, virgin, fasting; I love not the works of the flesh but its substance; I love the flesh that knows it must be judged; I love the flesh that for Christ is beaten, torn, and burned in martyrdom.

How foolish is their assertion that his books were tampered with by certain heretics and ill-disposed men can be proved from this. Who can be found more prudent, more learned, more eloquent than Eusebius and Didymus, the champions of Origen? One of them, in six volumes of his Apology, confirms that Origen thought as he himself does; the other tries so to excuse his errors as still to admit they are his, not denying that it was written but explaining the sense of what was written. It would be another matter if Didymus defended as well said what had been added by heretics. Origen alone, it seems, has been found whose writings were falsified throughout the whole world at once, and, as at the letters of Mithridates, all truth was erased from his volumes in a single day! If one book was tampered with, could all his works, published in different places and at different times, have been corrupted at once? Origen himself, in the letter he writes to Fabian, bishop of the city of Rome, repents of having written such things, and lays the blame for his rashness on Ambrose, because he made public what had been issued privately; and yet some still ingeniously argue that what displeases is not his!

Further, as for their bringing forward Pamphilus as his praiser, I thank them on my own account for thinking me worthy to be slandered along with a martyr. For if you say that Origen's books were tampered with by his enemies to defame him, why may I not say that a volume was composed under Pamphilus's name by his friends and followers, to vindicate him from infamy by the testimony of a martyr? See, you correct in Origen's books what he did not write, and you are surprised if someone publishes a book which Pamphilus did not publish? You can be refuted from a published work; he, who published nothing else, lies more open to false attribution. Produce any other work of Pamphilus: you will find none anywhere; this is the only one. How then shall I know that it is Pamphilus's? No doubt its style and flavour could tell me. I will never believe that a learned man devoted the first fruits of his talent to controversies and infamy. The very name Apology points to an accusation, for only what is under charge is defended. I will bring forward one thing which only a fool or a shameless man would contradict. This book said to be by Pamphilus contains the beginning of Eusebius's six books in defence of Origen, up to about a thousand lines; and in the rest the writer of that same work brings testimonies by which he tries to prove that Origen was catholic. Eusebius and Pamphilus were in such harmony that you would think them men of one soul, and one took his name from the other. How then could they disagree, so that Eusebius in his whole work proves Origen to hold Arian doctrine, and Pamphilus shows him a defender of the Nicene synod, which came later? From this it is shown that the little work is by Didymus, or someone else, who joined the rest of the limbs to the cut-off head of the six books. But let us grant, beyond what is needed, that it is by Pamphilus: by Pamphilus, but not yet a martyr, for he wrote it before he suffered martyrdom. 'And how,' you will say, 'was he worthy of martyrdom?' Surely so that he might wipe out error by martyrdom, and cleanse one fault by shedding his blood. How many martyrs throughout the world were subject to various sins before they were put to death! Shall we then defend sins, because those who were afterwards martyrs were first sinners?

This, dearest brothers, I have dictated in haste in reply to your letter, overcoming my resolve so as to write against one whose talent I had formerly praised, preferring to risk my reputation rather than my faith. My friends have brought me to this, that if I keep silent I am judged guilty, if I answer, an enemy. Both conditions are hard, but of the two I will choose the lighter: a quarrel can be made up; blasphemy deserves no pardon. What labour I have endured in translating the books Peri Archon I leave to your judgement, since to change anything in the Greek is not to translate but to pervert, and to render the same things word for word is by no means the part of one who wishes to keep the grace of style.

With your voice you urge me to write, you frighten me with your eloquence, and in your letter-writing style you almost represent Tully. As for your complaint that I send small and unpolished little letters, this comes not from carelessness but from fear of you, lest by writing to you at greater length I should send you more to find fault with. And, to confess simply to your holy mind, at the one season for sailing to the West so many letters are demanded of me at once that, if I wished to answer every one individually, I could not manage it. So it happens that, leaving aside the arrangement of words and the care of writers, I dictate whatever comes into my mouth, and regard you only as the friend of my words, not their judge.

Your letter put forward two little questions: first, why the heart of Pharaoh was hardened by God, and the apostle said, 'It is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy,' and the other things that seem to take away free will; second, how those who are born of believers, that is, of the baptized, are holy, when they cannot be saved without the gift of grace afterwards received and kept.

The first question Origen answered most powerfully in the books Peri Archon, which I recently translated at the request of our Pammachius. Held up by that work, I could not fulfil what I had promised you, and have again put off our Daniel. And indeed I would have deferred to another time the wish of one man, though a very dear and excellent one, had not almost the whole brotherhood of that same city asked for it, saying that many were in danger and were accepting perverse doctrines. So I was compelled by necessity to translate books in which there is more evil than good, and to keep to this measure, neither adding nor taking away anything, and preserving the Greek faithfully in a complete Latin form. You can borrow copies of them from the brother mentioned above, though Greek suffices for you, and you ought not to seek the muddy streams of my small talent when you drink from the springs themselves.

Further, since I am speaking to a learned man, trained both in the divine Scriptures and in secular literature, I wish your Worthiness to be reminded not to think that, like some rustic buffoon, I reject everything Origen wrote (which his untimely zealots charge against me, accusing me, like Dionysius the philosopher, of having suddenly changed my opinion), but only that I repudiate his perverse doctrines. For I know that those who call good things evil and those who judge evil things good lie under an equal curse; who make bitter sweet and sweet bitter. Or what obstinacy would it be to praise someone's learning in such a way as to follow his blasphemy too?

On your second problem Tertullian discussed in his books On Monogamy, asserting that the children of believers are called holy because they are, as it were, candidates for the faith and are not polluted by any filth of idolatry. At the same time, consider that we read of holy vessels in the tabernacle and the other things that belong to the rite of the ceremonies, when certainly nothing can be holy except what perceives and worships God. It is therefore an idiom of the Scriptures sometimes to call 'holy' what is clean, purified, and expiated, as Bathsheba too is written to have been sanctified from her uncleanness, and the temple itself is called a sanctuary.

I beg you not to accuse me in the silent judgement of your mind either of vanity or of falsehood. The Lord is witness to my conscience that from the very outset and beginning of the translation the necessity mentioned above held me back; and you yourself know that what is done with a preoccupied mind is not done well. The little cloak, short in its weave but very wide in love, I gladly received to keep my old head warm, and I rejoiced both in the gift and in its giver.

I have recently received your Blessedness's letter, which both makes amends for your long silence and calls me to my usual duty. So, although your word to us has been conveyed through the holy brothers Priscus and Eubulus, yet, since we see that they, stirred by zeal for the faith, have hastily gone round the regions of Palestine and hunted the scattered basilisks to their lairs, we write briefly to say that the whole world exults and glories in your victories, and that the crowd of peoples looks on with joy at the standard raised at Alexandria against heresy and the trophies rising. Well done for your courage, well done for your zeal for the faith! You have shown that your silence until now was management, not consent. For I speak freely to your Reverence: we grieved that you were too patient and, not knowing the helmsman's plan, we were eager for the destruction of the lost. But you held your hand up long and delayed the blow so that you might strike harder. As for the reception of a certain person, you ought not to be aggrieved against the bishop of this city, since you gave no instruction in your letters, and it would have been rash for him to pass sentence on a matter he did not know. Yet I think he neither dares nor wishes to offend you in anything.

The holy bishop Agatho has been sent, with our dearly beloved deacon Athanasius, on church business; when you learn of it, I do not doubt that you will approve our zeal and glory in the victories of the church. For certain wicked and raving men, who wished to sow and establish the heresy of Origen in the monasteries of Nitria, have been cut down by the prophetic sickle, since we remembered the apostle's admonition: 'Rebuke them severely.'

Make haste, then, you too, to receive a share of this reward, by correcting with your words all who have been deceived. And we desire, if it can be done, in our days to keep the catholic faith and the rules of the church together with the peoples subject to us, and to put to rest all new doctrines.

Your Blessedness's letter has done me a double favour, in having as its bearers the holy and venerable Bishop Agatho and the deacon Athanasius, and in showing your zeal for the faith against a most wicked heresy. The voice of your Blessedness has sounded through the whole world, and while all the churches of Christ rejoice, the devil's poisons have fallen silent. The old serpent no longer hisses, but, twisted and disembowelled, hiding in the darkness of caves, he cannot bear the bright sun.

Indeed, even before you wrote, I had sent letters on this matter to the West, showing to men of my own language some of the tricks of the heretics. And I think it came about by God's dispensation that at the same time you too wrote to Pope Anastasius and, without knowing it, strengthened my view. But now, admonished by you, we will apply greater zeal to recall the simple from error both here and far away, and not fear to incur the hatred of certain people (for we must not please men, but God), although the heresy is defended by them more ardently than it is attacked by us. At the same time I beg you, if you have any synodal letters, to send them to me, so that, strengthened by the authority of so great a bishop, I may open my mouth for Christ more freely and confidently.

The presbyter Vincent came from Rome two days before I sent this letter; he greets you humbly and in frequent conversation praises your letters, by which, after Christ, Rome and all Italy have been set free. Strive, then, most blessed father, and at every opportunity write to the Western bishops, so that they may not cease, as you yourself indicate, to cut down the evil shoots with a sharp sickle.

I have come to know, as your Holiness also knows, the monk Theodore, and I have approved his zeal, since when he left us to sail to Rome he would not set out until he had visited and embraced, as his own heart, you and the holy brothers who are with you in the monastery. When you receive him, rejoice in the tranquillity of the church. For he has seen all the monasteries of Nitria and can report the continence and meekness of the monks, and how, the followers of Origen having been extinguished and put to flight, peace has been restored to the church and the Lord's discipline is kept.

Would that those among you too, who are said to undermine the truth secretly, would lay aside their hypocrisy! The brothers in these regions, thinking ill of them, have prompted me to write this. Therefore beware of such men and flee them, and, as it is written, if anyone does not bring you the church's faith, do not even greet him. Although it is superfluous for me to write this to you, who can even recall others from error, yet it does no harm for prudent and learned men too to be admonished out of concern for the faith. I wish all the brothers who are with you to be greeted in my name.