Latin original · 39 verses · some words can be tapped for a gloss · long chapter, split into parts; this part covers 1:1452–1:1490 (3306 verses in all)
From which it is clear—according to the testimony of another book—that the heart of man is prone to evil from his youth, and that between the works of the flesh and of the spirit, which the apostle Paul enumerates, the soul, midway, wavers, now catching at these, now at those. For no one is born without vices; the best is he who is oppressed by the fewest, just as you might blame moles sprinkled upon a beautiful body. This is what the mouth of the prophet signifies in other words: 'I was troubled and did not speak'; and in the same volume: 'Be angry and sin not'; and that saying of Archytas of Tarentum to his careless bailiff: 'I would already have beaten you to death, were I not angry.' For the anger of man works not the righteousness of God. What has been said of one perturbation, let us refer to the rest.
Just as it is human to be angry but Christian not to carry anger into effect, so all flesh indeed desires the things that are of the flesh and by certain allurements drags the soul to deadly pleasures; but it is ours to quench the ardour of pleasure by a greater love of Christ, and to subdue the wanton beast with the bridle of fasting, so that it may desire not lust but food, and may carry its rider, the Holy Spirit, with a moderate and composed gait. To what end all this? That you may know yourself to be human and, unless you take heed, subject to human passions. We are all made of the same clay, framed from the same beginnings:
and both in silk and in rags the same lust holds sway; it neither fears the purple of kings nor spurns the squalor of beggars. And it is far better for you to suffer in the stomach than in the mind, to command the body than to serve it, to totter in your step than in your chastity. Nor let the aids of penitence at once flatter us, which are the remedies of the unhappy. The wound is to be avoided which is healed by pain. It is one thing to enter the harbour of safety with the ship whole and the merchandise safe, another to cling naked to a plank and be dashed by the frequent returns of the waves against the roughest rocks. Let a widow not know the indulgence of a second marriage, nor be acquainted with that saying of the apostle, 'It is better to marry than to burn.' Take away the worse, 'to burn,' and in itself it will not be good 'to marry.' Far be the calumnies of the heretics:
'We know that marriage is honourable and the bed undefiled.' Even Adam, when expelled from paradise, had but one wife. Lamech first, accursed and bloodthirsty, and descending from the stock of Cain, divided one rib into two, and the punishment of the flood forthwith overthrew the nursery of bigamy. Whence that saying of the apostle, which for fear of fornication he is compelled to concede, writing to Timothy: 'I will that the younger women marry, bear children, be mothers of families, give no occasion to the adversary for the sake of detraction.' Why he conceded it, he immediately subjoined: 'For some have already turned aside after Satan.' From which we understand that he stretches out his hand not to those standing but to those lying prostrate, a crown to the former, a hand to the latter.
See what sort of things second marriages are, which are preferred to brothels, because 'some have turned aside after Satan.' Therefore let the young widow, who cannot or will not contain herself, rather take a husband than the devil. A fine and desirable thing, forsooth, which is accepted in comparison with Satan! Jerusalem too once played the harlot and spread her feet to every passer-by. In Egypt she was first deflowered, and there her breasts were bruised. And when she had come to the desert and, impatient of the delay of Moses her leader, as though raging with the frenzy of lust, had said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt,' she received precepts not good and judgments most evil, in which she should not live, but be punished.
What wonder, then, if to wanton widows too—concerning whom in another place the apostle had said, 'When they have grown wanton against Christ, they wish to marry, having condemnation because they have made void their first faith'—he conceded the precepts of bigamy, precepts not good and judgments most evil, thus indulging a second husband and a third and, if it pleased, a twentieth, that they might know that not so much husbands were given them as adulterers cut off?
These things, dearest daughter in Christ, I press upon you and repeat again and again, that, forgetting the things behind, you may stretch forward to the things before you (Phil 3:13), having those of your own rank whom you may follow: Judith from Hebrew history, and Anna the daughter of Phanuel from the glory of the Gospel, who dwelt in the temple day and night and by prayers and fastings preserved the treasure of chastity. Whence the one, as a type of the Church, struck off the devil's head; the other was the first to receive the Saviour of the world, being aware of the mysteries that were to come. This I ask at the close of my discourse: that you judge the brevity of this little book to have arisen not from poverty of eloquence nor from barrenness of subject-matter, but from the greatness of modesty, since I fear to force myself long upon unknown ears and dread the hidden judgment of readers.
LXXX. PREFACE OF RUFINUS TO THE BOOKS PERI ARCHON, WHICH HE TRANSLATED FROM GREEK INTO LATIN. I know that very many of the brethren, prompted by desire for the knowledge of the Scriptures, have asked of certain learned men skilled in Greek that they might make Origen a Roman and present him to Latin ears.
And in this matter, when our brother and colleague, entreated by bishop Damasus, had translated two homilies on the Song of Songs from Greek into Latin, he prefaced that work so elegantly and magnificently that he stirred in anyone the desire to read Origen and to seek him out most eagerly, saying that to that soul belongs what was said, 'The king has brought me into his chamber' (Song 1:4), affirming of him that, although in his other books he surpasses all, in the Song of Songs he has surpassed even himself. Indeed in that very preface he promises that he will bestow upon Roman ears both the books on the Song of Songs themselves and very many others of Origen;
But he, as I see, taking pleasure in his own style, pursues a matter of greater glory, that he should be the father of the word rather than its translator. We therefore follow the task begun by him and approved, but we cannot adorn the sayings of so great a man with equal powers of eloquence. Whence I fear lest by my own fault it come to pass that this man—whom he rightly acknowledged as a doctor of the Church second after the apostles in knowledge and wisdom—should through the poverty of our speech appear far inferior to himself. Considering this often, I kept silent, and did not consent to the brethren who frequently entreated me to this work. But your force, most faithful brother Macarius, is so great that not even inexperience can withstand it;
Wherefore, that I might no longer endure you as so heavy an exactor, I yielded even against my own resolve, yet on this condition and rule: that, as far as may be, in translating I should follow the rule of my predecessors, and especially of that man whom I mentioned above. He, when he had translated into Latin more than seventy little books of Origen, which he called homiletic, and also some of the volumes written on the Apostle—in which, though some stumbling-blocks are found in the Greek—so filed and purged all things in translating that the Latin reader finds nothing in them which departs from our faith.
Him therefore we also follow, though not in powers of eloquence, yet in the rules of discipline, as far as we can, taking care, namely, not to bring forward those things which are found in Origen's books to be discrepant and contrary to himself. The cause of this diversity we have set forth for you more fully in the Apology which Pamphilus wrote in defence of Origen's own books, with a very short treatise added, in which by evident proofs, as I judge, we have shown that his books have been corrupted in very many places by heretics and ill-willed men, and especially these which you now demand that I translate, that is, Peri Archon, which may be called either 'On First Principles' or 'On Sovereignties,' which are in truth both most obscure and most difficult.
For there he disputes concerning such matters in which the philosophers, having consumed their whole age, were able to find nothing. But this our author, so far as he could, did this: that the faith of the Creator and the account of created things, which they drew toward impiety, he might turn toward piety. Wherever therefore we found in his books anything contrary to that which by himself in other places had been piously defined concerning the Trinity, we either passed it over as adulterated and foreign, or brought it forth according to that rule which we have often found affirmed by himself.
If indeed anything, as one speaking to the already skilled and knowing, while he wished to pass over briefly, he brought forth rather obscurely, we, that the passage might become clearer, added those things which we had read more openly about the same matter in his other books, being zealous for explanation; yet we said nothing of our own, but, though from other places, rendered back to him his own words. These things I have pointed out in the preface for this reason, lest perchance the slanderers think they have again found matter for accusing. But you shall see what perverse and contentious men do.
This so great labour, meanwhile, has been undertaken by us—if only, at your prayers, God shall help—for this reason: not that we might close the mouth of the slanderers (which cannot be done, though perhaps God will do even this), but that we might supply matter to those willing to advance toward the knowledge of things. This indeed I adjure and charge everyone who is either about to copy or to read these books, in the sight of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, by faith in the kingdom to come, by the sacrament of the resurrection from the dead, by that eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels:
as he would not by eternal inheritance possess that place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and where their fire shall not be quenched and their worm shall not die (Mark 9:44)—that he add nothing to this writing, take nothing away, insert nothing, change nothing, but compare it with the copies from which he copies, and correct it to the letter and punctuate it, and not keep an uncorrected or unpunctuated codex, lest the difficulty of the meanings, if the codex be not punctuated, breed greater obscurities for readers. LXXXI. TO RUFINUS. That you tarried long at Rome your own letter has shown; nor do I doubt that you were recalled to your homeland by longing for your spiritual parents—you whom a mother's grief forbade to go, lest you should grieve more in her presence for what, absent, you could scarcely bear.
As for your complaint that everyone serves his own stomach and does not acquiesce in our judgment—the Lord is witness to our conscience that after our friendships were reconciled no rancour has intervened, whereby we would injure anyone; nay rather, with all caution we have provided that not even chance should turn into ill-will. But what can we do, if each thinks he acts justly in what he does, and seems to himself to be biting back rather than biting? True friendship ought not to dissimulate what it feels. A little preface to the books Peri Archon was sent to a certain person, which from the style I understood to be yours, in which obliquely—nay, openly—I am attacked. With what intent it was written, you shall see; how it is understood is plain even to fools.
I too could—I who very often have declaimed figured controversies—recall something of the old art and praise you in your own manner. But far be it from me to imitate what I blame in you; nay rather, I have so tempered my judgment that I both escaped the crime charged and, so far as in me lies, did not injure a friend even though injured. But I beg you that, if hereafter you wish to follow anyone, you be content with your own judgment alone. For the things we seek are either good or evil: if good, they need not another's help; if evil, the multitude of sinners affords no patronage for error.
These things I wished rather to expostulate with you as a friend than, being provoked, to rage publicly, that you may observe that I purely cherish reconciled friendships and do not, according to the saying of Plautus, hold a stone in one hand and offer bread with the other. My brother Paulinianus has not yet returned from our homeland, and I think you will have seen him at Aquileia with the holy pope Chromatius. The holy presbyter Rufinus also, for a certain cause, we sent through Rome to Milan and asked that he see you with our affection and homage, and to the other friends we signified the same, lest 'biting one another you be consumed one of another' (Gal 5:15).
Now it belongs to your moderation and to your people to give no occasion to the impatient, lest you find not all like me, who can take delight in figured praises. LXXXII. TO THEOPHILUS. Your letter, showing you to be the possessor of the Lord's inheritance—who, going to the Father, spoke to the apostles: 'My peace I give to you, my peace I leave to you' (John 14:27)—has testified that you are also a partaker of that blessedness in which the peacemakers are called blessed (Matt 5:9). You caress as a father, you instruct as a master, you establish as a pontiff.
You come to us not in the austerity of the rod, but in the spirit of gentleness and meekness (1 Cor 4:21), so that from the very first word you might echo the humility of Christ, who saved the mortal race not by lightning and thunder, but crying and lying in a manger, upon the cross. For you had read what was foretold beforehand in a type of him: 'Remember, Lord, David and all his meekness' (Ps 132:1), and afterward presented in him: 'Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart' (Matt 11:29). Whence, gathering many things from the sacred volumes in praise of peace, flying through the fields of the Scriptures in the manner of bees, whatever was sweet and fit for concord, you harvested with skilful eloquence.
Running therefore toward peace, we have been incited; the sails set out for sailing, the more frequent breeze of your exhortation has filled, so that we drank the sweet streams of peace not so much with reluctant and fastidious as with eager and full throats. But what do we do, in whose power is only the will of peace, not its effect? And although the will too has its reward with God for its purpose, yet the unfinished work saddens even the willing with grief. Knowing this, the apostle too—namely that the most perfect peace consists in the will of both parties—said: 'As much as in you lies, having peace with all men' (Rom 12:18). And the prophet: 'Peace, peace.' And where is peace? (Jer 6:14).
For it is no great thing to profess peace with the voice and destroy it in deed, to strive for one thing and demonstrate another, to sound concord with words and demand servitude in fact. We too desire peace, and not only desire it but ask for it—but the peace of Christ, true peace, peace without enmities, peace in which no war is wrapped up, peace which does not subject adversaries but joins them as friends. Why do we call domination peace and not render to each thing its own name? Where there is hatred, it is called enmity; where there is charity, there alone is it called peace. We neither rend the Church nor are divided from the communion of the fathers, and from our very cradle, so to speak, we have been nourished with catholic milk.
For no one is more churchly than he who was never a heretic. But we know not peace without charity, nor communion without peace; and we read in the Gospel: 'If you offer your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave there your gift before the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother; and then coming offer your gift' (Matt 5:23-24). If we cannot offer our gifts without peace, how much more receive the body of Christ! With what conscience shall I answer 'Amen' at the Eucharist of Christ, when I doubt the charity of him who offers it? I beg you to hear me patiently and not to think the truth flattery. Does anyone commune with you unwillingly? Does anyone with outstretched
his hand turn away his face and among the sacred banquets offer the kiss of Judas? At your coming, I think, the crowd of monks is not afraid but rejoices, when they come forth in eager rivalry to meet you and, going out from the hiding-places of the desert, desire to surpass one another in their 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. It is an old saying: whom one fears, he hates; whom he hates, he wishes dead. Whence also in our writings, since the beginnings of little ones consist in fear, 'perfect love casts out fear' (1 John 4:18). You do not seek that the monks be subject to you, and therefore you have them the more subject.
You offer a kiss, they submit their necks; you show yourself a soldier and obtain a leader; you are as one among many, that you may be one out of many. Liberty is quickly indignant if it is oppressed by force; no one commands a free man more than he who does not compel him to serve. We know the ecclesiastical canons, we are not ignorant of the ranks of each order, and by reading and daily examples up to this age we have learned many things, experienced many things. He who strikes with scorpions and thinks his fingers thicker than his father's loins (1 Kings 12:10-11) quickly scatters the kingdom of meek David. Certainly the Roman people did not endure pride even in a king.
That leader of the army of Israel, who had afflicted Egypt with ten plagues and to whose command heaven, earth, and seas were subject, is proclaimed the meekest among all men whom the earth then brought forth, and therefore for forty years he held the principate, because he tempered the pride of power with gentleness and meekness. He is stoned by the people and prays for those who stone him; nay rather he wishes himself to be blotted out of the book of God, lest the flock committed to him should perish (Exod 32:32). For he desired to imitate that Shepherd whom he knew would carry even the straying sheep on his own shoulders. 'The good shepherd,' he says, 'lays down his life for his sheep' (John 10:11).
And the disciple of the good Shepherd wishes to be anathema for his brethren and kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites (Rom 9:3). And if he desires to perish lest the lost should perish, how much more must good parents take care not to provoke their sons to wrath and by excess of harshness compel even the gentlest to become hard! (Eph 6:4; Col 3:21). A letter compels me to speak more briefly, grief more at length. He writes in those letters of his—peaceful, as he himself wishes, but most biting, as I judge—that he was never injured by me nor called a heretic. And how does he himself not injure me, bandying me about as one sick with a most grievous disease and a rebel against the Church?
Provoked by others, he accuses another, and by a most prudent counsel compels one who is silent to speak, showing that he spares his adversaries and injures one who does not injure. Before my brother was ordained, he says there was no question between him and the holy pope Epiphanius concerning dogmas. And what reason compelled him—as he himself nevertheless writes—to dispute among the people about that which no one was asking? For your prudence knows that questions of this sort are dangerous, and that nothing is safer—unless perhaps it be necessary to speak—than to keep silent about great matters.
Certainly, was that genius and river of eloquence so great that in one ecclesiastical treatise he says he has comprehended all those matters about each of which we know most learned men have written countless thousands of lines? But what is this to me? Let him who heard it know it, let him who wrote it know it: he himself frees me from accusing him. I was neither present nor did I hear: I am one of the people—nay, not even one, since while many were crying out I kept silent. Let us compare the persons of the accuser and the accused, and to whichever excels either in merit or in life or in doctrine, let us the more give our trust. Do you see that with closed eyes, as it is said, I graze the very heights, not so much eloquent in what I have conceived in mind as indicating what I keep silent?
I have understood and approved your management, that, consulting the peace of the Church, you pass by, as it were, the Sirens' songs with stopped ear. Otherwise, you who from a young age have been learned in the sacred letters know in what sense each thing is said, how speech balanced into ambiguous statements both does not condemn what is another's and does not deny what is ours. But pure faith and open confession does not seek tricks and quibbles of words. What is believed simply must be confessed simply. I could indeed freely proclaim, and even among the swords and fires of Babylon say: 'Why is one thing asked, another answered? Why is there not a simple and open confession?' He fears everything, tempers everything, leaves everything ambiguous, and as it were walks upon the ears of grain.
But out of zeal and expectation of peace I do not lend words to a fervent temper. Let others complain freely, whom, though injured, he himself does not dare to injure; I meanwhile will now be silent and will feign, as my management, either inexperience or fear. For what will he do to me who accuse, who, as he himself testifies, disparages one who praises him? His whole letter is filled not so much with an exposition of faith as with insults to us. My name, without any of the courtesies with which we are wont
used to soothe men, is frequently taken up, carped at, bandied about, as though I were blotted out of the book of the living if his letters have bruised me, or as though I had ever sought trifles of this kind—I who from adolescence, shut in the cell of a monastery, wished rather to be something than to seem it. Some of us he so addresses with honour as to tear them, as though we too could not say those things which no one keeps silent. He reproaches one as a cleric made from a slave, though he himself has some clerics of the same condition and has read that Onesimus, reborn among Paul's chains, began to be a deacon from a slave (Philemon). He boasts of a sycophant and, lest he be compelled to prove it, says that he has heard it. Oh, if it were permitted me too to say what many cry out, and to acquiesce in the slanders of others:
then he would understand both that we too know what all know, and that I hear what no one is ignorant of. He says to him, as it were rewards restored for slander: who would not shudder at so shrewd and cunning a genius? Who could answer so great a river of eloquence? Which is worse: to endure slander or to commit it, to accuse one whom you afterward love, or to grant pardon to one who sins? Which is less to be borne: to be made from a sycophant an aedile, or a consul? He himself knows what I keep silent, what I say, what I too have heard, what perhaps for fear of Christ I do not believe. He accuses me of having translated Origen into Latin. This not only I, but also the confessor Hilary did; and yet each of us, cutting away whatever was harmful, translated what was useful.
Let him read it 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 certainly not thoroughly imbibed it, let those who are accustomed translate for him, and then he will know that in this very thing for which he disparages me I am to be praised. For just as I have always attributed to Origen the interpretation and the commentaries of the Scriptures, so most steadfastly I have taken away from him the truth of doctrines. Do I put Origen into the crowd? Do I associate him with the other commentators, and do I not say that I hold the apostles in one way, the rest of the commentators in another: that they always speak true things, but these, in certain matters, as men, go astray?
A new kind of defence: so not to deny Origen's faults that you charge others along with him—namely, that the one whom you dare not defend openly, you may protect by the similar error of many. But no one could read six thousand volumes of Origen, which he did not write; and I more easily believe that the witness of this statement lied than that its author did. He says my brother is the cause of discord—a man who rests in the cell of a monastery and interprets the clericate not as an honour but as a burden. And after he has coddled us up to the present day with a feigned show of peace, he has stirred the ears of the Western priests, saying that he, a youth and almost a boy, was made a presbyter in his own parish of Bethlehem.
If this is true, all the bishops of Palestine are not ignorant of it. For the monastery of the holy pope Epiphanius, by the name Ad Bethabara, in which my brother was ordained presbyter, is situated in the territory of Eleutheropolis and not in that of Aelia. Moreover his age is known to your beatitude, and since it has reached the span of thirty years, I think it in this not to be reproved, which according to the mystery of the manhood assumed in Christ is perfect. Let him remember the ancient law, and he will perceive that after twenty-five years men were chosen from the tribe of Levi into the priesthood (Num 8:24). Or if in this single testimony he follows the Hebrew truth, let him know that priests are made at thirty years. And lest perhaps he say:
'Old things have passed away, behold all things are made new' (2 Cor 5:17)—let him hear with Timothy: 'Let no one despise your youth' (1 Tim 4:12). Certainly he himself, when he was ordained bishop, was not far in age from that in which my brother now is. Or if this is allowed in bishops, is it not allowed in presbyters—lest by antiphrasis they seem to differ from their own name—why did he himself ordain as presbyter one either of the same or of lesser age, and, what is more than this, a minister of another church? But if he cannot have peace with my brother except when he is subject and refuses the bishop of his own ordination, he shows that he does not so much desire peace as, under the occasion of peace, vengeance, nor is content with another's quiet and repose, provided he keep intact what he threatens.
Even if he himself had ordained him, and this lover of solitude wished to rest and did nothing that would rend the Church, he would owe him nothing beyond the honour owed to all priests. Thus far his self-defence—nay rather his accusation—and his rambling discourse against us has been drawn out. To which I have replied, as in a letter, briefly and in passing, that from what I have said he may understand what I have kept silent, and may know that we are men, a rational animal, and can understand his prudence, and are not of so dull a heart that, like brute animals, we hear only the sound of words and not their meanings. Now, however, I beg you to grant pardon to my grief; and if it is proud to have replied, it is much prouder to have accused.