Letters (CSEL) 1 part 19/85

Why then did it seem good to you thus grievously to swell up and be tossed against us on account of the work of God, which was done for the edification and not for the destruction of the brethren? But this too I marveled at exceedingly, that you spoke to my clerics, asserting that you had given me command through the holy presbyter and abbot of the monks, Gregory, that I should ordain no one, and that I had promised this, saying: 'Am I a youth, or do I not know the canons?' Hear then the truth in the word of God: that I neither heard this nor knew it nor at all recall this speech. But I suspected lest perhaps, as a man, I had forgotten amid many things, and for this reason I inquired of holy Gregory and of Zeno the presbyter, who is with him.

Of these the abbot Gregory answered that he was utterly ignorant of this. But Zeno said that, when the presbyter Rufinus was speaking to him in passing about some other matter, he had also said this: 'Do you suppose the holy bishop is going to ordain anyone?' and that the conversation had stopped there. But I, Epiphanius, neither heard anything nor answered anything. Wherefore, most beloved, let not fury forestall you, nor let indignation seize you, nor be you moved in vain, and, grieving over one thing, turn to other things, and by sinning seem to have found an occasion. Which the prophet, shunning, prays to the Lord, saying: Incline not my heart to words of malice, to make excuses in sins.

This too, on hearing it, I marveled at, that certain men, who are wont to carry little rumors to and fro and always to add to what they have heard, so as to stir up sorrows and quarrels among the brethren, have troubled you as well and told you that in prayer, when we offer sacrifices to God, we are accustomed to say for you: 'Lord, grant to John that he may believe rightly.' Do not think us so rustic that we could have said these things so openly. For although I always pray this in my heart, yet, to confess plainly, I never uttered it into the ears of others, lest I should seem to hold you in little esteem, most beloved. But when we complete the prayer according to the rite of the mysteries, we say both for all and for you also:

'Guard him who preaches the truth,' or certainly thus: 'Do thou grant, O Lord, and guard, that he may preach the word of truth,' as the occasion of the discourse offers itself and the prayer takes its due sequence. Wherefore I beseech you, most beloved, and, fallen at your feet, I pray: grant to me and to yourself that you may be saved, as it is written, from a perverse generation; and depart from the heresy of Origen and from all heresies, most beloved. For I see that it is on account of this cause that all your indignation has been stirred up — because I said to 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 thus, and admonished you, you contradicted me and led me — nay, not only me, but also very many other Catholics who were present — to sorrow and tears. And, as I understand, this is the whole of your indignation and this the fury, and for this reason you threaten that you will send letters against me, and that your talk will run this way and that; and for the defense of the heresy, stirring up hatreds against me, you break the charity which we had toward you, so far that you have made us even do penance for having communicated with you, thus defending the errors and dogmas of Origen. I will speak plainly:

we, according to what is written, spare not even our own eye, but pluck it out, if it has caused us to stumble, nor our hand nor our foot, if they have made us stumble. And you therefore, whether you be our eye or our hand or our foot, will suffer the like. For what Catholic could with equanimity endure — even among those who adorn their faith with good works — that they should hear the doctrine and counsel of Origen and believe that famous preaching of his: 'The Son cannot see the Father, neither can the Holy Spirit see the Son'? These things are written in the books On First Principles; in these words we read them, and thus spoke Origen:

For just as it is incongruous to say that the Son can see the Father, so it is inconsequent to suppose that the Holy Spirit can see the Son. That too — who would endure it, Origen saying, that souls were angels in the heavens and, after they had sinned on high, were cast down into this world and, as into mounds and sepulchers, so were banished into these bodies to pay the penalties of their ancient sins; and that the bodies of believers are not temples of Christ but prisons of the damned?

Thence, depraving the truth of history by the falsehood of allegory, he multiplies words without end, and, supplanting all the simple by various persuasion, now asserts that souls (psychai) are so called according to the Greek etymology because, coming down from the heavenly regions to the lower, they have lost their former warmth; now that this body is, on this account, called by the Greeks a 'chain' (desmos), or, by another property, a 'corpse,' because the souls have fallen from heaven; while by very many, according to the varied furniture of the Greek tongue, the body is interpreted as sema, that is, a 'memorial,' because it holds the soul so shut up within itself as tombs and mounds hold the corpses of the dead. And, if this is true, where is our faith? Where the proclamation of the resurrection?

Where the apostolic doctrine, which until now endures in the churches of Christ? Where that blessing to Adam and to his seed, and to Noah and to his sons: Increase and multiply and fill the earth? For now it will be no blessing, but a curse, according to Origen, who turns angels into souls, and makes them descend from the lofty summit of their dignity to lower things — as though God could not give souls to the human race by a blessing, unless the angels had sinned, and there were as many ruins in heaven as there are births on earth. We must abandon the doctrine of the apostles and prophets and of the law and of the Lord Savior Himself thundering in the Gospel: on the contrary, Origen commands and lays down a law — not to say that

he binds his disciples fast — that no one should pray to ascend into heaven, lest, sinning again worse than he had before sinned on earth, he be hurled headlong into the world. Yet trifles and ravings of this kind he is wont to affirm by a perverse interpretation of the Scriptures, making them signify something other than what is true, saying: Before I was humbled by malice, I offended; and that: Return, my soul, into thy rest; and also that: Bring my soul out of prison; and, in another place: I will confess to the Lord in the land of the living — whereas without doubt the sense of the divine Scripture is other than that which he twists into his heresy by malignant interpretation;

which the Manicheans also do, and the Gnostics and the Ebionites and the followers of Marcion and the other heresies, eighty in number, who, drawing testimonies from the most pure fountain of the Scriptures, interpret them not as they are written, but wish the plainness of ecclesiastical speech to signify what they themselves think. That too, which he strives to assert — whether I should grieve or laugh, I know not. The distinguished doctor dares to teach that the devil will again become that which he was, and will return to the same dignity, and ascend into the kingdoms of heaven. O the wickedness! Who so senseless and stupid would accept this — that Saint John the Baptist, and Peter, and John the apostle and evangelist,

and Isaiah too, and Jeremiah, and the rest of the prophets, become coheirs with the devil in the kingdom of heaven? I pass over his frivolous exposition on the tunics of skins — with what effort and with how many arguments he labored, that we might believe the tunics of skins to be human bodies. He, among many things, says: Was God a tanner or a leather-worker, to fashion the skins of animals and sew from them tunics of skins for Adam and Eve? It is manifest, therefore, he says, that he speaks of our bodies. And, if this is so, how do we read Adam speaking, before the tunics of skins and before the disobedience and the fall from paradise — not according to allegory, but truly: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh?

Or whence was that taken which the divine word attests: 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, which He had taken from him, into a wife for him? Or what bodies did Adam and Eve cover with fig leaves, after they had eaten of the forbidden tree? But who could patiently endure Origen denying the resurrection of this flesh by his slippery argumentations, as he most manifestly declares in the volume of his Explanations of the first psalm and in many other places?

Or who could bear to hear Origen bestowing upon us in the third heaven a paradise, and transferring the paradise which Scripture records from the earth to the heavenly regions, and interpreting allegorically all the trees that are written of in Genesis—namely, that the trees are angelic powers—when the truth admits no such thing? For divine Scripture did not say, 'He set Adam and Eve upon the earth,' but rather: He cast them out of paradise; and: He made them to dwell over against paradise, and not 'He flung them beneath paradise'; and: He set a flaming sword and cherubim to guard the entrance to the tree of life, and not 'the ascent'; and: A river goes forth out of Eden—it did not say 'it descends out of Eden.' This river is divided into four heads:

the name of the first is Phison, and the name of the second is Geon. I—yes, I myself—have seen the waters of Geon, waters that I beheld with these eyes of flesh. This is that Geon which Jeremiah points to when he says: What have you to do with the way of Egypt, to drink the muddy water of Geon? I have also drunk of the great river Euphrates waters that were simply water, which I could touch with my hand and sip with my mouth—not spiritual waters. But where there are rivers and waters that are seen and drunk, there it follows that the fig trees also and the other trees, of which God says, Of every tree that is in paradise you shall eat, are of the same nature as the rivers and the waters.

But if the water that is seen is truly water, it necessarily follows that the fig tree also is real, and the other trees, and that Adam was a real man formed in the body from the very beginning, just as Eve was, and not in some phantom—not, as Origen would have it, that he received a body only afterward, after the fall, on account of sin. But you say: 'We read that holy Paul was caught up and set in the third heaven and even into paradise.' You say well: for when he places 'the third heaven' and afterward adds 'and into paradise,' he shows that heaven is in one place and paradise in another. But those conjuring tricks—who would not at once cast them aside and despise them?—when Origen says of the waters that are above the firmament that they are not waters but certain angelic powers,

and again that the waters which are above the earth, that is, beneath the firmament, are contrary powers, that is, demons? And how then do we read that in the flood the cataracts of heaven were opened and the waters of the flood overwhelmed everything, whence the fountains of the deep were opened and the whole world was covered with waters? Alas for the madness of men joined to folly, who have abandoned that word spoken in the Proverbs: Hear, my son, the instruction of your father, and cast not away the law of your mother, and have turned aside to error, and tell the fool to be his own master, nor do they despise the foolish things spoken by a fool, as Scripture testifies: The fool speaks folly, and his heart understands vain things!

Wherefore I beseech you, dearly beloved, and as though sparing my own members, out of the love I bear you, I pray as I write and beg, that you may fulfill that which is said: Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate you, and did I not pine away because of your enemies? The words of Origen are hostile and worthy of hatred, and opposed to God and to his saints—and not only those which I have mentioned, but countless others besides; for it is not now my purpose to dispute against all the doctrines of Origen.

Origen has stolen nothing from me, nor was he of my kindred, nor did I take up hatred and strife against him on account of any worldly matters or inheritance; but—to confess it plainly—I grieve, and grieve exceedingly, seeing very many of the brethren, and especially those who hold no small office and have even attained to the highest rank of the priesthood, deceived by his persuasion and, by his most perverse teaching, made into food for the devil; in whom is fulfilled that word which is said: He shall sport over every stronghold, and shall gather to himself its choicest food, like sand, even a multitude of captives.

But may God deliver you, brother, and the holy people of Christ who have been entrusted to you, and all the brethren who are with you, and above all Rufinus the presbyter, from the heresy of Origen and from the other heresies and from their ruin. For if on account of one word or two contrary to the faith many heresies have been cast out of the Church, how much more shall this man be reckoned among the heretics, who has devised so many perversities and such evil doctrines against the faith, and has shown himself an enemy of God and of the Church! For among many evils he dared even to say that Adam lost the image of God—though nowhere at all does Scripture signify this.

For if it were so, never would all things that are in the world serve the seed of Adam, that is, the whole race of men, as the apostle James also declares: All things are tamed and made subject to human nature. For the universe would never have been made subject to men, unless men, in accordance with that whereby they rule over all things, possessed the image of God.

Now divine Scripture, joining and associating together the grace of the blessing which it had bestowed upon Adam and the generations that came from him—lest perhaps any should dare by a malicious interpretation to say that the grace of God was given to one man only, and that he alone was made after the image of God who was formed from the dust, together with his wife, but that those who were conceived in the womb and were not born as Adam was did not possess the image of God—straightway joins in order and says: And Adam lived two hundred and thirty years, and knew Eve his wife, and she bore him a son after his own likeness and after his own 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 own image and showing that the grace which he had given to men endured in them, said: You shall not eat flesh in its blood; for I will require your blood at the hand of every man that sheds it, because I made man after the image of God. Moreover, after another ten generations down to Abraham, and from Abraham to David another fourteen generations—which twenty-four generations together make up so many years—the Holy Spirit, in the thirty-eighth psalm, when he complained of all men, that they walked in vanity and were subject to sins, says: Yet surely every man walks in an image.

Moreover, after David, even under his son Solomon, we read something of this kind named concerning the image of God. For it says in Wisdom, which is written under his title: He created man incorruptible, and gave him the image of his own nature. And again, after a thousand one hundred and eleven years, more or less, we read in the New Testament that men have not lost the image of God. For James the apostle and brother of the Lord, of whom we made mention above also, instructs us, lest we be caught in the snares of Origen, that man has the image and likeness of God. For when he had disputed at some length concerning the tongue of men, he added: it is an unstable evil: with it we bless God and the Father, and with it we curse men, who are made after the likeness of God.

Paul also, the chosen vessel, who fulfilled the doctrine of the Gospel by his preaching, teaches us that man was made after the image and likeness of God, saying: A man ought not to let his hair grow long, since he is the glory and image of God—calling him simply by the name of image, and signifying the likeness by the term glory. In place, then, of the three testimonies from holy Scripture which you said would suffice you if I could find them, behold, we have given seven testimonies. Who then will endure the ineptitudes of Origen?

—that I may not say anything harsher and become like either himself or his disciples, who dare, at the peril of their own souls, to assert whatever comes into their mouth, and to give orders to God rather than either to pray to him or to learn the truth from him. For some of them say that the image which Adam first received perished when he sinned;

others suppose that, since the Son of God was to have a body from Mary, that body itself is the image; others say it is the mind, others say it is virtue, these say it is baptism, those say it is that man rules over all things after the image of God—belching forth this or that after the manner of drunkards. These men ought rather to have fled from so great a peril, and not to deny what God says, but believing simply that they are saved, and to grant to God the sure and true knowledge of his own gift—in which part, above all, he created men after his own image and likeness; but these men, abandoning these things, have entangled themselves in many questions, and through them have been plunged into the mire of sins.

But we, dearly beloved, believe those things which the Lord has spoken, and we know that the image of God remains in all men; and we grant to him the knowledge of that part in which man was created after the image of God. But neither should that saying deceive anyone—which certain persons, reading it in the epistle of John, do not understand—where it says: Now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be. But we know that, when he shall be revealed, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. For this was said on account of the glory which is there to be revealed to his saints, just as we read in another place: from glory to glory; of which glory the saints have already in this present age received the pledge and the small portion:

first Moses, whose face shone exceedingly and radiated like a flash of 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 beheld by all. But this which we have said in the case of a few is to be understood of all, that that which is written may be fulfilled: Everyone who sanctifies himself shall be numbered among the blessed. For blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Since these things are so, dearly beloved, guard your own soul and cease to murmur about us; for divine Scripture says: Do not murmur one against another, as some murmured and perished by the serpents.

Rather, acquiesce in the truth, and love those who love you and love the truth. And may the God of peace grant to us, according to his clemency, that Satan may be crushed under the feet of Christians, and that every perverse occasion may be cast away, lest the bond of charity and peace and the preaching of the right faith be torn asunder among us.

Furthermore—since I have heard that certain persons murmur against me—when we were journeying together to the holy place which is called Bethel, that I might there make a gathering with you according to ecclesiastical custom, and I had come to a village which is called Anablatha, and, passing by, had seen there a lamp burning, and had asked what place it was, and had learned that it was a church, and had entered in to pray, I found there a veil hanging in the doorway of that same church, dyed and painted, and bearing an image, as it were, of Christ or of some saint; for I do not sufficiently remember whose image it was.

When therefore I had seen this—that in the church of Christ, contrary to the authority of the Scriptures, there hung the image of a man—I tore it, and rather gave counsel to the keepers of that place, that they should wrap some poor dead man in it and carry him out for burial. But they, murmuring against me, said: 'If he wished to tear it, it was only right that he should give another veil and replace it!' When I had heard this, I promised that I would give one, and would send it at once. But there was a little delay in the meantime, while I sought to send the best veil in its place; for I supposed that one ought to be sent to me from Cyprus.

But now I have sent what I was able to find, and I beg that you would command the presbyter of that place to receive the veil from the reader, which has been sent by us, and thereafter to give order in the church of Christ that veils of this kind, which come contrary to our religion, should not be hung up. For it befits your honesty to have rather this solicitude, and to exercise that scrupulousness which is worthy of the church of Christ and of the peoples who have been entrusted to you. But as for Palladius the Galatian, who was once dear to us and now stands in need of the mercy of God—beware, because he preaches and teaches the heresy of Origen, lest perchance he lead any of the people entrusted to you into the perversity of his error. Letter LII. To the presbyter Nepotian.

You ask, dearest Nepotian, by letters sent across the sea, and you ask repeatedly, that I would set forth for you in a brief volume rules of living, and by what reason he who, having forsaken the warfare of the world, has begun to be either a monk or a cleric, may hold to the straight path of Christ, and not be swept away into the various by-ways of the vices. When I was a young man, indeed almost a boy, and was curbing the first impulses of my wanton age by the hardness of the desert, I wrote to your uncle, holy Heliodorus, a hortatory letter full of tears and complaints, and one that displayed the affection of a forsaken companion. But in that work I sported according to my age at that time, and, while the studies and teachings of the rhetoricians were still warm within me, I decked out certain passages with scholastic flowers.

But now, with hoary head and furrowed brow, like oxen with dewlaps hanging from the chin, the cold blood stands still about my heart. Wherefore in another place the same poet sings: Age carries off all things, even the mind; and shortly after: Now so many songs are forgotten by me, my very voice too now fails Moeris. And lest we seem to bring this forward only from pagan literature, learn the sacred mysteries of the divine volumes. David, at seventy years of age, once a warlike man, in the cold of old age could not be made warm. Therefore a maiden is sought out from all the borders of Israel, Abishag the Shunammite, who should sleep with the king and warm his aged body. Does it not seem to you, if you follow the letter that kills, to be either some invention from a mime or the sport of Atellan farces?

The cold old man is wrapped in garments, and grows warm only in the embrace of a young girl. Bathsheba was still living, Abigail survived, and the rest of his wives and concubines whom Scripture records: all are rejected as it were cold, and the aged man is warmed by the embraces of one alone. Abraham was far older than David, and yet, while Sarah lived, he sought no other wife; Isaac had twice David's years, and never grew cold with Rebecca now grown old; I say nothing of the men before the flood, who, after nine hundred years—with limbs not merely senile but almost rotten—by no means sought girlish embraces; certainly Moses, the leader of the people of Israel, was a hundred and twenty years old, and did not change Zipporah.

What then is this Shunammite, a wife and virgin so ardent that she warmed a cold man, so holy that she did not provoke the warmed man to lust? Let the most wise Solomon expound his father's delights, and let the peaceful man narrate the embraces of the warlike man: Possess wisdom, possess understanding. Forget it not, and turn not aside from the words of my mouth, and forsake her not, and she shall lay hold of you; love her, and she shall preserve you. The beginning of wisdom: possess wisdom, and in all your possession possess understanding; encompass her, and she shall exalt you; honor her, and she shall embrace you, that she may give to your head a crown of graces, and may a crown of delights protect you.

Almost all the virtues of the body are changed in the aged, and while wisdom alone increases, the rest decrease: fastings, sleeping on the bare ground, running to and fro, the receiving of strangers, the defense of the poor, perseverance in standing at prayer, the visiting of the sick, the labor of the hands from which alms may be furnished—and, not to prolong my discourse, all the things that are performed through the body, when the body is broken, become less.

Nor do I say this to mean that in the young and those of still more robust age—at least in those who by labor and most ardent study, and also by holiness of life and frequency of prayer to God, have attained knowledge—wisdom grows cold, which in very many old men withers with age; but rather that youth sustains many wars of the body, and, amid the incitements of the vices and the ticklings of the flesh, is choked, as it were like a fire in greener wood, and cannot unfold its own brightness. But old age—again I remind you—of those who instructed their youth in honorable arts and meditated in the law of the Lord day and night, becomes more learned with age, more practiced by use, wiser with the passage of time, and reaps the sweetest fruits of its old studies.

Hence that wise man of Greece, when at the completion of a hundred and seven years he saw himself dying, is said to have declared that he grieved to depart from life just then, when he had begun to be wise. Plato died writing in his eighty-first year; Isocrates completed ninety-nine years in the labor of teaching and writing; I pass over the other philosophers, Pythagoras, Democritus, Xenocrates, Zeno, Cleanthes, who flourished in the pursuits of wisdom already in advanced age. I come to the poets: Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Stesichorus, who, being of great age, sang some swan-like and, as death drew near, sweeter-than-usual strain.

Sophocles, when on account of his extreme old age and his neglect of household affairs he was accused of madness by his sons, recited to the judges the play of Oedipus, which he had lately written; and he gave such a specimen of wisdom in his now broken age that he turned the severity of the tribunals into the applause of a theater. Nor is it any wonder, since even Cato, the most eloquent of the Roman race, already a censor and an old man, neither blushed nor despaired to learn Greek letters. Certainly Homer relates that from the tongue of Nestor, now aged and almost decrepit, speech flowed sweeter than honey. But even the mystery of the very name of Abishag indicates the ampler wisdom of the aged.