Apology against Jerome 2.26–2.39

Nor must that admirable deed of his be passed over, though we would not bring shame on our hearers: that the granddaughter of the consul Marcellinus, the first of the Roman nobility, who, leaving her little son at Rome, went to Jerusalem and was there named Thecla for her outstanding merit of virtue, as he had written in his very Chronicle, he afterwards erased from his copies, when he saw that the life of a woman of stricter discipline displeased him. We are compelled indeed to gather still more from his writings, so that it may be known how true is this too that he writes, that he mentioned Origen in only two short prefaces of his, and in them praised not his faith but his genius, not as a teacher of doctrine but as an interpreter. Meanwhile I have adduced ten.

Can you bring forward any writings of mine like these, in which you can convict me of having erred even in youth, as you are not so much confessing as convicted? I said that I imitated or would follow you only in the method of translating, but in nothing else; and in this, in which you say every injury was done you, I followed what I had seen you do in the Homilies on the Gospel of Luke: that where you found something not rightly said about the Son of God in the Greek, you passed it over, in that place where it says, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour." You know that about the soul you did not pass over what is usually said, if anywhere, but even wrote it more clearly by adding some assertions of your own, as in that place, "Behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the infant leaped in my womb," where you say that this was not the beginning of his substance, and added of your own, "and of his nature." These things and a thousand others like them you removed in your translations, whether in these very homilies, or in Jeremiah, or in Isaiah, but above all in Ezekiel. And concerning the faith, that is, the Trinity, when in some places you found it otherwise, you passed over what seemed good to you. Both of us held this kind of translating. If another blamed it, you certainly ought to answer, who had done it first. Now you yourself blame that for which, without doubt, you yourself are blamed. To translate word for word you formerly pronounced both foolish and malicious. In this I followed you. Do you want me to repent of this, because you have now changed your opinion and say that you translated word for word? If some things in the faith built up less, you removed them; yet you removed them so as not to cut away everything everywhere. Finally, in the Homilies on Isaiah, the vision of God he referred to the Son and the Holy Spirit. So you translated, adding of your own something to draw the author's sense to a milder understanding. For you say: "Who are these two seraphim? My Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit." And of your own you added: "And do not think that the nature of the Trinity is divided if the offices of the names are kept distinct." These things I too did in very many places, and either cut away or bent to a sounder understanding. For these you bid me do penance. I do not think you mean this. But if neither you nor I should repent for these things, for what others do you invite me to repentance?

No writings of mine exist in which any error of mine needs correcting. Many of yours exist, all of which, as I see, are now to be condemned by your own judgment. You had excepted for yourself the commentaries on the Letter to the Ephesians, in which you thought you had composed something more correct. You yourself have seen how they have been found like Origen's meanings in everything, and indeed to contain something more than what you demand be condemned. And had you not yourself already shut off from yourself the opportunity of repentance for these, saying, "Read over my commentaries on the Letter to the Ephesians, and from them you will know how I opposed Origen's doctrines," you would perhaps wish to repent of these too, and condemn yourself in them as in the others. Yet, as far as in me lies, I grant you leave to repent for these too; and if you do penance for everything, not only what you have said but what you will say, you do well. For it is certain that everything you have written is to be repented of. But if anyone thinks me blameworthy on the ground that I translated anything of Origen at all: if this is blamed, I am the last in this work, and the blame must begin with the first. And yet no one punishes an act which he did not forbid beforehand. It was permitted; we did it. If a law prohibits anything, it is usually observed for the future. But someone says that books ought to be condemned with their author. But what are we to do with this author, who writes the same things, as I have shown most fully above? Let him receive a like and the same sentence. I neither ask nor press for this, though he deals with me as an enemy; but, as I see, he procures it for himself by rashly condemning others.

But to speak with you again from your own words: you yourself write in these invectives of yours that by my translation I showed that I indeed was catholic, but Origen, whom I was translating, a heretic. For you say: "That is to say, I am indeed catholic, but this man whom I translate is a heretic." For you say this is to be read. If, as you say, I showed by this whole work of mine that I am catholic and Origen a heretic, what more is sought? Is not your whole aim that he be called a heretic and I a catholic? If you testify that I said this and did it sufficiently in my whole work, what cause of accusation is left to you? To what purpose was this invective of yours against us? If I showed Origen to be a heretic and myself a catholic, did I do right or not? If right, why do you call to blame and accusation what was rightly done? If it is not right that Origen be called a heretic, why do you summon me to court under this name? What need was there for you to translate more maliciously what had been translated according to your own manner of translating, though in rougher language? What need, certainly, to deceive your hearers, so that while they think one thing you do another? For they suppose that you are acting against those who defend Origen as catholic; but you censure and accuse those who designated him a heretic. Was it perhaps for this that you invited me to repentance? I had not understood. Yet know that I do not repent even of this, but say that not everything found in his books is to be received as catholic. Whether these things are his, as you say, or inserted by others, as we think, God will see. Meanwhile, when it comes to the height and truth of the faith, they are rejected by us. But tell me, what do you demand of us? Do you want us to call Origen a heretic? You blame us for having done so. Catholic, then? For this you accuse us. State more plainly what you want, if indeed you can find any middle between these that you want. These are all your witticisms gathered from the acuteness of Alexander and Porphyry and Aristotle himself. This is all that boasting with which you proclaim that from earliest youth to old age you have been versed in the schools and disciplines of grammarians, rhetoricians and philosophers: that you should come forward to pronounce Origen a heretic, and in the very speech in which you passed sentence on him, accuse the man you were addressing for having designated him a heretic. See how there is nowhere care for truth and faith, nowhere regard for religion and judgment, but only a practised lust for speaking evil and tearing the brothers dwells on the tongue; only human rivalry in the heart; only envy and spite in the mind: so much so that, when you had no cause of hatred, you took it indignantly that I named you brother and colleague, though with praise. Forgive me that I did not know you were called the unnameable and not to be addressed. Yet I wonder that you demand that I condemn the things which you complain I have marked.

To that part of his accusation, indeed, it seems superfluous even to reply, where he wishes the pious and religious sayings of the martyr Pamphilus either to be called false or, even if they are true, decides that they are to be despised. To whom will this man defer now? Whom will he spare now? With him all the ancient Greek church writers erred. And how he disparages the Latins, how he carps at each of them, old or new, whoever reads his various works recognizes. But now not even martyrs can have any reverence with him. "I do not believe," he says, "that it is the martyr's." If we wish to say this of all the books of writers, what proof will there be in each case? If I say, "It is not true that the books of the Stromata you mention are Origen's," from what are they proved to be his? "From their likeness to the rest," he says. But just as one who wishes to forge someone's writing imitates his hand, so also one who wishes to insert his own sayings under another's name will no doubt imitate the style of him whose name he has taken. Next, to pass over for brevity's sake everything that could most justly be said: if you wished to dare so much as to censure a martyr, you ought to have brought into the open the very sayings that seemed to you censurable; and then each reader would have seen what was absurd there, what consistent, what unjust, what certainly against the apostolic rules, but some impiety or other, for the expiation of which, as you say, the martyr shed his blood. If he read those very words, he would say, by his own judgment and no longer yours, either that the martyr erred, or that an absurd and impious writing was composed by another under the martyr's name. But now, knowing that if what you censure is read, the mark will be turned back on him who blames unjustly, you do not bring forward what you censure; but with that censor's rod of yours and arrogant authority you decree: "Let that one be barred from the libraries; let this one be received"; and again: "Let this very one who has been received today be cast out tomorrow, if anyone besides me praises him, and with him the one who praised him. Let this man be held catholic, even if he seems at some time to have erred; let no pardon for error be given to that one, even if he says what I said; and let no one translate him or read him, lest anyone learn my thefts. This man is a heretic, but he is my teacher. And this one, though he is a Jew and, hired from the synagogue of Satan, sells words for a price, is yet my teacher, and let him be preferred to all, because with them alone the truth of the Scriptures remains." If the whole church together had laid this authority on you, and it were required of you to judge of each and all, ought you not to have begged off so heavy and dangerous a burden from being laid on you? But now we have advanced so far by daily practice of disparagement that we do not spare even martyrs. But let us suppose that this book is not the martyr's but that of any one member of the church: did that writer, whoever he is, use his own words, so that it should seem that we must yield to the merits of the author? He sets down examples from Origen's own volumes, and shows what he thinks on each point not by the words of his defender but by those of the very man who was accused. And just as your writings against you now are much more vehement than my words, so not the authority of the one excusing him but his own sayings defend him. And therefore the question of the author is superfluous where the defence is such as needs no advocate.

But now we must come to that most wicked and most invidious head of his accusation, or rather not invidious but envious. For he says: "Which of the prudent, or which of the saints, wished to undertake to turn into Latin what you have dared? I myself," he says, "though often asked by many, did not do it." And indeed why the saints did not do this is easily excused. For it does not follow that one who is a holy and prudent Latin has also a sufficient knowledge of the Greek language; nor is anything taken from the holiness of one who lacks knowledge of a foreign tongue. Or again, it does not follow that one who has knowledge of Greek also has the will to translate. Or even if he has, one who translated a few things is not at once to be examined why not more, or why not these rather than those. For there is freedom in work of this kind, and it lies either in the choice of the writer or in the desire of the one asking. And yet he speaks of the holy Hilary and the holy Victorinus: of whom I think the one translated nothing at all from the Greek under the title of translator, and the other, he himself says, used the knowledge of a certain presbyter Heliodorus, so that what Heliodorus drew from the Greek spring Victorinus set out in Latin, because he knew little or no Greek. Why they did not do these things, then, is easily and plainly excused: of you indeed one must wonder why you did it. For what was more bold, or what more rash, than to translate these books of Origen, almost the whole content of which you had already written in other books? All of whose sayings, which you now call censurable, you had brought out in language under your own name?

Or was it to change now, by a new interpretation altered by the Jews, the books of the divine Scriptures which the apostles handed down to the churches of Christ as the fullest Instrument of faith? Which of these two causes seems to you the more unlawful? For the sayings of Origen, whether they please, please as a man's sayings, or whether they displease, are easily despised as a man's false sayings. But these things which you now translate and send through churches and monasteries, through towns and fortresses, how shall we receive them? As divine, or as human? And what are we to do, when what bears the names of the prophets or lawgivers is affirmed by you to be truer than what the apostles approved? This offence, I say, how will it be amended; rather, how will this crime be expiated? For if to have thought otherwise in explaining the law is held damnable with you, how often must it be judged damnable to pervert the law itself into something other than the apostles handed down? Why should we not rather say, for the rashness of this daring: Which of so many and such great prudent and holy men who were before you dared to put his hand to this work? Who presumed to violate the sacred utterances of the Holy Spirit and the divine volumes? Who but you laid hands on the divine gift and the inheritance of the apostles?

And indeed, since it is related that from the beginning there was a great number in the churches of God, and especially at Jerusalem, of those who had believed from the circumcision, among whom the office of the episcopate they administered testifies that there was a perfect knowledge of both languages and a creditable skill in the law: who, then, in this abundance of learned men dared to pillage the divine Instrument which the apostles handed down to the churches, and the deposit of the Holy Spirit? Or is it not pillaging when some things are changed and it is said that an error is being corrected? For the whole story of Susanna, which offered the churches of God an example of chastity, has been cut away by him and thrown away and set aside. The hymn of the three young men, which is sung especially on solemn days in the church of God, has been entirely erased from its place by him. And why do I recount them one by one, when I cannot grasp their number? To omit saying of this that there is no doubt that the one harmonious voice of the seventy-two men translating in their cells was uttered by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and ought to be of greater authority than what was translated by one man with Barabbas breathing on him: to omit this, see what we say, for example. Peter presided over the Roman church for twenty-four years. There is no doubt that, as with the other things that belong to instruction, he himself also handed down to the church the Instruments of the books, which were certainly already being read then, while he sat and taught. What then? Did the apostle Peter deceive the church of Christ, and hand down to it false books containing nothing of truth, and, though he knew that the truth was held among the Jews, wished what is false to be held among the Christians? But perhaps he says that Peter was without letters, and knew indeed that the books of the Jews were truer than those in the church, but could not translate for want of skill in the language. What then? Did the fiery tongue given from heaven through the Holy Spirit do nothing in him? Did not the apostles, then, speak in all tongues?

But let us grant that the apostle Peter could not do what this man has now done: what do we say of Paul? Was Paul too without letters? "A Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to the law a Pharisee," taught at the feet of Gamaliel: do you think that he, who was also at Rome, could not have supplied whatever Peter lacked? How then did these men, who commanded their disciples to attend to reading, not give them corrected and true readings? And they who command us not to attend to Jewish fables and genealogies, which provide questions rather than edification, and again bid us beware and watch above all those who are of the circumcision: how did they not foresee by the Spirit that a time would come, after about four hundred years, when the church, learning that the truth of the Old Instrument had not been handed down to it by the apostles, would send envoys to those whom they then called the Circumcision, beseeching and imploring them to bestow on it something of the truth that is with them? That it would confess that for these whole four hundred years it had erred and been ignorant of what is true? That it had indeed been taken from the Gentiles as a bride for Christ by the apostles, but not adorned by them with true necklaces; that it had thought they were precious stones, but now had found out that these were not true gems which the apostles of Christ had placed on it; that it blushed to go out in public adorned with false and not true stones; and therefore asked them to send it even that Barabbas whom it had once rejected in order to marry Christ, who, with one man chosen from its own, might restore to it the true ornaments which the apostles had not supplied?

What wonder is it, then, if he tears me, the least of men and of no account, if he cuts down Ambrose, if he censures Hilary, Lactantius, Didymus? Nor ought I to grieve much over the injury to me in that he undertook to translate my work afresh, since in this insult he has made me equal to the Seventy translators. But how is this to be taken? How much do you reckon has been added to unbelief among the Gentiles by this deed? For what is done among us is not hidden from them. Knowing, then, that our law has now been corrected or changed, do they not say among themselves: "These people are in error, and there is nothing of truth with them. See, they themselves correct and amend their laws when they wish. And it is certain that error went before where correction has followed; nor can that seem divine which is changed by man"? This is what your excessive wisdom has given us: that we are all judged fools even by the Gentiles. I want no wisdom which Peter and Paul did not teach; I want no truth which the apostles did not approve. These are your words: that after four hundred years the simple ears of the Latins ought not to be struck by the sound of a new doctrine. Now you say: "Everyone who thought that Susanna gave an example of chastity to the married and the unmarried was wrong; it is not true. And everyone who thought that the boy Daniel was filled with the Holy Spirit and convicted the adulterous elders was wrong; it was not true. And the whole church throughout the world, whether of those who are in the body or of those who have gone on to the Lord, whether holy confessors or holy martyrs, whoever sang the hymn of the three young men in the church of the Lord, all erred and sang false things." So now, after four hundred years, the truth of the law, bought for a price from the synagogue, comes forth to us. Now that the world has grown old and all things are being pressed toward the end, let us write even on the tombs of the ancients, so that they too who read otherwise here may know that Jonah had the shade not of a gourd but of an ivy; and again, when the lawgiver pleases, not of an ivy but of some other shrub.

"But Origen too," he says, "made asterisks, taking them from the translation of Theodotion, in order to compose the volumes called the Hexapla." And why do you bring forward this Origen, now for condemnation when it pleases you, now for imitation when it pleases you? Is it likely that you should employ the same man as both defender and defendant? Do you think you have as author of your deed him whom you yourself are the first to condemn, and for whose condemnation you rally the Roman senate with your letters? You should have provided for this beforehand. No one cuts down a tree on which he means to lean; no one in his own case implores the faith of one whose faith he himself rejects. Whether Origen did this or did not, what is it to you? If you wish to be judged by his example, read your own judgments again and see what you have said. "This is not clearing oneself," you say, "but seeking accomplices in a crime." Then do not you seek accomplices in a crime either, but seek to clear your deed. Yet let us see what Origen, at once defendant and plaintiff, did of this kind. I do not find even one passage of the divine Scriptures translated by him from the Hebrew. And how can your deed and his seem alike? Apostates and Jews translated the things which the Jews chiefly use in their reading. And because, whenever a dispute arose, they often falsely alleged that some things in our Scriptures had been changed, or were lacking, or were in excess, Origen wished to show our people what reading of the Scriptures was held among the Jews; and he wrote out each of their editions on its own pages or columns, and marked what they have added or taken away with certain signs placed at the heads of the verses; and in another's work, not his own, he fixed only his own marks, so that we might know not what seemed to us, but what seemed to the Jews disputing against us, to be lacking or in excess. It is as if someone, having taken a muster roll containing the names of soldiers, tried to see how many soldiers survive and how many have fallen in war; and the man sent to inspect, inquiring, writes his own mark, for example, as is usually done, a theta, beside the name of each dead man, and marks a survivor in turn with his own sign. Will the man who sets a mark beside the dead man's name, and marks the survivor in turn with his own sign, seem to have done anything to cause the one's death or the other's life? No: he has only marked by signs of annotation those who were killed by others. So also did Origen: what had been either removed by other translators or set out more fully, he marked with his own signs, that is, the little marks of asterisk and obelus. But he inserted not even one word of his own, nor did he make the reliability of our copies waver in any point; rather, the things that seemed less plain and clear according to the course of the letter he showed to be full of the mysteries of spiritual understanding. What comfort, then, can Origen's deed give you in this, when you can show no work of his like yours, and when in this you labour so hard that the letter may kill whoever follows it, while he on the contrary strives to be the champion of the Spirit that gives life?

Yours, then, brother, yours is this deed, and it is certain that you had no companion or partner in it in the church, except that one man whom you often mention, Barabbas. For who else would dare to violate the Instruments handed down by the apostles to the church but a Jewish spirit? They, my brother, dearest before you were captured by the Jews, they hurl you into these evils. They make you brand Christians in published books; they make you spare not even martyrs, and write things speakable and unspeakable about every order of Christians, disturb our peace, and breed scandals in the church. They even compel you to pass sentence against yourself and your writings, as things you said when once a Christian. And therefore we are all filth to you, while they please you too much with their wicked arts. For if you had acquiesced in Paul's letter, which says, "If a brother is overtaken in any fault, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness," how would you have boiled over so as to keep no order of spiritual correction at all? Suppose that I wrote something insulting; suppose that I did an injury to you, a man of the highest eloquence, my brother and colleague, whom I said was to be imitated in the method of translating: yet after that peace restored with the greatest sweat, this first complaint of injuries from me had reached you. But let us suppose that injury of yours too, that in translating Origen, imitating you, I passed over some things which seemed to me to have less of edification in the faith. Was I to be blamed for this, perhaps, and corrected? Writings of the brothers were sent to you, as you say, demanding that the faults of the translator be censured. What do you, a spiritual man, do? What pattern and example do you approve for others in such matters? You not only announce your brother's shame laid bare to those outside, but you uncover even what was covered. Suppose that I did this not in imitation of you, but some drunkenness creeping on, as with the patriarch, laid bare our shame: would you have incurred a curse if, walking backwards, you had covered our disgrace with the light cloak of your reply, and if the letter of one awake had veiled what the pen of one dozing had uncovered?

"But I could write nothing else," he says, "to those who had sent me such a letter; for unless I had written so, or had retranslated word for word what you had translated by sense, I too would have seemed to follow Origen." I do not yet say what that letter is or of what kind; yet since it bears the name of the noble man Pammachius, what would have been absurd if you had answered him something like this: "Brother, one must not judge rashly of another's work. For you yourself know what you did when I sent the books against Jovinian to Rome: when some understood them otherwise than I remembered dictating them. When they were already being read by very many, and almost all were offended, among whom you yourself were thought to be, did you not withdraw the copies from the market and from public view, and send them back not to anyone else but to me, indicating the reason as well, that many seemed to be scandalized; whereupon I wrote an Apology afresh, and recalled to a more correct understanding, as far as I could, what was understood otherwise? It is fair, then, that we do to others what we wish done to us. For as you sent my books back to me to be corrected by me, so send his back to him, and point out what seems blameworthy, so that he may correct himself if he has erred in anything. Besides, we have already exercised our talent in many things, and many works have already been sweated out by us; he has undertaken almost his first work, and perhaps under compulsion; and it is no wonder if he wavered at first. Nor should an occasion for disparaging Christians be seized, but the benefit of correction sought."

If you had written this to him, would you not have given more grace and edification both to him, a man who has understanding in the fear of God, and to the other readers, than these invectives of yours now give of grief and confusion to all who fear God, who see in you a most foul lust for disparagement and in me a pitiable necessity of reply? For if, as I said, in your books written against Jovinian you are found now to assert the very things for which you censured him, and now to slip so far as to affirm that the defilement of marriage cannot be washed away even by the blood of martyrdom; and if correction of a doctrine of the Manichees seemed easy to you in these books which you had already published and given to very many to copy: what difficulty was there in correcting, if anything had perhaps gone wrong in it (as not reason but envy suggested), my work, not my own work but the translation of another's work? especially since it was still in sheets, which I had not yet fully read over or set out, which they found unpublished? Could not what had not yet been corrected be very easily corrected? But it is not from there, where he had nothing to blame, but from here that the whole biting comes: because he feared that through this would be betrayed the source from which comes all that he says, from which he is learned, from which he seems an interpreter of the Scriptures.