Letters (CSEL) 1 part 40/85

Although I have so replied that I have indicated my silence rather than my speech. Why do they seek peace from afar and wish it to be imposed on us by others? Let them be peacemakers, and at once peace follows. Why do they abuse the name of your holiness against us for the sake of terror, and, while your letter sounds peace and meekness, their words threaten harshness? Finally, how peaceful and pertaining to concord were the letters you sent us through the presbyter Isidore, we prove from this: that those who boast that they wish for peace refused to deliver them. Let them therefore choose what they will: either we are good or evil: if good, let them permit us to rest; if evil, why do they seek the society of the evil?

How much humility avails, he who now dissembles has learned by experience. He who by his own counsel once joined things disjoined, shows himself now to tear apart what has been joined to another's will. Recently he demanded and obtained exile for us; and would that he had been able to fulfil it, so that, just as the will is imputed to him for the deed, so we too might have the crown of exile not only in will but in effect! The Church was founded rather by shedding blood and suffering than by inflicting the outrages of Christ. By persecutions it grew, by martyrdoms it was crowned. But if these alone, among whom we dwell, love rigour and know not how to endure persecution but to inflict it—there are here too Jews, there are heretics of various dogmas, and above all the most impure Manichees:

why do they not dare to injure any of these even with a word, and desire to expel us alone; are we alone, who commune with the Church, said to rend the Church? I ask you, is it not a fair demand that either they expel those along with us, or keep us along with them? Except that in this they rather honour us, that at least by exile they separate us from the heretics. A monk—alas the grief!—both threatens monks and inflicts exile, and this a monk who boasts that he holds the apostolic chair. That nation knows not to succumb to terror, and to the impending sword it offers its necks rather than its hands. For what monk, an exile from his homeland, is not an exile from the world? What need is there of public authority and the expense of a rescript and running about over the whole world?

Let him but touch us with his little finger, and we will go out of our own accord. 'The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof' (Ps 24:1). Christ is not held shut up in a place. Moreover, as to what he writes—that through you and the Roman Church we commune with him from whom we seem to be separated at close quarters—there is no need to go so far: even here in Palestine we are joined to him in the same manner, and—lest this too be far off—in the little village of Bethlehem we are, so far as in us lies, associated in communion with his presbyters. From which it is clear that private grief must not be thought the cause of the Church, nor should the temper of one man—nay, through him, of others—be designated by the general name of the Church.

Wherefore, what I said at the beginning of the letter, even now I repeat: that we wish the peace of Christ, desire true concord, and ask you to admonish him not to extort peace but to will it. Let him be content with the past grief of our insults; let him at least blot out the old wounds by new charity. Let him be such as he was before, when he loved us of his own judgment. Let words not flow to him from another's temper; let him do what he wills, and not what he is compelled to will. Either as a pontiff let him command all equally, or as an imitator of the apostle let him serve the salvation of all in equal measure. If he shows himself such, we of our own accord offer our hands, we stretch out our arms;

let him have us as friends and parents, and feel that in Christ, as to all the saints, so to himself we are subject. 'Charity is patient, charity is kind, charity envies not, is not puffed up, bears all things, believes all things' (1 Cor 13:4-7). Charity is the mother of all virtues, and, as it were a threefold cord, the apostolic sentence is strengthened which says: 'faith, hope, charity' (1 Cor 13:13). We believe and we hope; and so through faith and hope we are joined by the bond of love.

For this reason we too left our homelands, that we might live at rest, without any rivalries, in the fields and in solitude, that we might venerate the pontiffs of Christ—those, that is, who preach the right faith—not with the fear of masters but with the honour of fathers, that we might defer to bishops as bishops and not be compelled, under another's name, to serve others whom we do not wish. We are not so puffed up in heart as to be ignorant of what is owed to the priests of Christ. For he who receives them receives not so much them as him whose bishops they are. But let them be content with their own honour—and let them know that they are fathers, not masters—especially among those who, despising the ambitions of the world, prefer nothing to quiet and repose.

And may Christ, God almighty, grant to your prayers that we be joined together in peace, not by a feigned name but by a true and faithful love, lest by biting one another we be consumed by one another. LXXXIII. FROM PAMMACHIUS AND OCEANUS TO JEROME. Pammachius and Oceanus to Jerome the presbyter, greeting. A certain holy man among the brethren has brought to us some leaves of a certain writer, which contained, translated into the Latin tongue, a volume that goes under the name of Origen and is entitled 'On First Principles.'

And since there are in these pages many things which disturb the slenderness of our understanding, and which we judge to be spoken less than catholically — we even suspect that, in order to excuse the author, many things have been withdrawn from his books which could have demonstrated his open impiety — we beseech your excellency that in this matter especially you would deign to expend a labour which will profit not so much ourselves as all who dwell in the City: namely, that you would make plain in your own speech the aforesaid book of Origen according to its true text, just as it was published by the author himself, and that you would bring to light the things which have been interpolated by his defender; and that whatever things, even in these leaves which we have sent to your holiness, are spoken either against the catholic rule or ignorantly, you would refute and convict.

To be sure, in the preface to his work he subtly made mention of your holiness, though suppressing the name, saying that he himself was completing a work which had been promised by you — thereby obliquely implying that you too hold the same view by a like reasoning. Purge, therefore, the suspicions of men and convict the slanderer, lest, if you dissemble, you seem to have consented. LXXXIV. TO PAMMACHIUS AND OCEANUS. Jerome to his brethren Pammachius and Oceanus, greeting. The leaves which you sent have honoured me with an insulting compliment, extolling my talent in such a way as to take away the truth of my faith.

Since at Alexandria and at Rome and in almost the whole world good men are wont to boast over my name, and love me so much that heretics cannot exist without me, I will pass over persons and answer only to the matters and the charges. For it profits the cause nothing to curse back at those who curse, and to bite one's adversaries in retaliation, when we are commanded not to render evil for evil, but to overcome evil with good, to be filled with reproaches, and to offer the other cheek to him who strikes. They cast it up against me that I once praised Origen. Unless I am mistaken, there are two passages: the little preface to Damasus in the homilies on the Song of Songs, and the prologue to the book of Hebrew Names. What is there said in them about the doctrines of the Church?

What of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? What of the resurrection of the flesh? What of the state and substance of the soul? A plain interpretation and teaching was praised in plain words. Nothing there was framed concerning the faith, nothing concerning doctrines. Only the moral topic is treated, and the cloud of allegory is dispelled by a serene exposition. I praised the interpreter, not the dogmatist; the talent, not the faith; the philosopher, not the apostle. But if they wish to know my judgment concerning Origen, let them read my commentaries on Ecclesiastes, let them turn again to the three volumes on the Epistle to the Ephesians, and they will understand that I have always gone against his doctrines. For what folly is it so to praise anyone's teaching that you follow also his blasphemy?

Blessed Cyprian too makes use of Tertullian as his master, as his writings prove; and although he takes delight in the talent of that learned and ardent man, he does not follow Montanus and Maximilla along with him. Apollinaris wrote most powerful books against Porphyry; Eusebius admirably composed his ecclesiastical History. Yet the one of them introduces a halved economy (dispensation) of Christ, and the other is the 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.' Neither must the good things of our adversaries be disparaged, if they have anything honourable, nor must the vices of our friends be praised; and each thing is to be judged not by the weight of persons but of matters.

Lucilius too is criticized for running with an unpolished metre, and yet his wit and charm are praised. When I was a young man, I was carried along by a marvellous ardour for learning, nor, according to the presumption of certain persons, did I teach myself. I frequently heard Apollinaris of Laodicea at Antioch and cultivated his friendship; and though he instructed me in the holy Scriptures, I never received his contentious dogma concerning their meaning. My head was already being sprinkled with grey and it befitted a master rather than a disciple; yet I went on to Alexandria and heard Didymus. For many things I give him thanks: what I did not know, I learned; what I knew, I did not lose, though he taught it differently. Men thought I had made an end of learning; yet again at Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with what toil, at what price did I take Baraninas as my nocturnal teacher!

For he feared the Jews, and presented to me a second Nicodemus. Of all these I make frequent mention in my little works. Certainly the dogma of Apollinaris and of Didymus is mutually contradictory; let each troop, then, drag me off on either side, since I confess both as my master. If it is expedient to hate men and to detest any nation, I abhor the circumcised with a marvellous hatred; for to this day they persecute our Lord Jesus Christ in the synagogues of Satan. Let someone cast it up to me, why I had a Jew for a teacher; and a certain man dares to bring forward my letters to Didymus as though to a master. A grave crime in a disciple, if I have called a learned old man my master!

And yet I wish to inspect that very letter, which, though kept back so long a time for slander, contains nothing beyond honour and greeting. These things are silly and frivolous. Convict me rather where I have defended a heresy, where I have praised the perverse dogma of Origen. In my reading of Isaiah, in which two seraphim are described crying out, while he interprets them as the Son and the Holy Spirit, did I not turn that detestable exposition into the two Testaments? The book is in men's hands, published twenty years ago. All my little works, and especially my commentaries, according to the opportunity of the passages, tear at the pagan sect.

But as to what they object, that I gathered his books beyond all men — would that I had the volumes of all commentators, so that by diligence in reading I might make up for the slowness of my talent! I gathered his books, I confess; and for that very reason I do not follow his errors, because I know all that he wrote. Believe one who has tried it: I speak as a Christian to Christians — his doctrines are poisoned, alien to the holy Scriptures, doing violence to the Scriptures. I read, I say, I read Origen; and if there is a crime in reading, I confess it — and Alexandrian papers emptied my purse. If you believe me, I was never an Origenist; if you do not believe me, I have now ceased to be one.

But if not even so are you brought to belief, you compel me to write in my own defence against your darling, so that, if you do not believe me denying, you may at least believe me accusing. But one who errs is more readily believed than one who has been corrected. Nor is it any wonder; for they think me their fellow-initiate, and suppose that for the sake of the animal and clay-bound I am unwilling openly to confess our doctrines. For it is their own decree that pearls are not lightly to be cast before swine, nor is the holy thing to be given to dogs, and to say with David: 'In my heart I have hidden thy words, that I may not sin against thee'; and in another place, concerning the just man: 'He speaks,' it says, 'the truth with his neighbour,' that is, with those who are of the household of faith.

From which they wish it to be understood that we, who have not yet been initiated, ought to hear falsehood, lest we little ones and sucklings be choked by feeding on more solid food. But that they are bound together among themselves by the orgies of perjuries and of falsehood, the sixth book of the Stromata, in which he compounds the sentences of Plato with our doctrine, teaches most plainly. What then shall I do? Shall I deny that I am of the same doctrine? They will not believe me. Shall I swear? They will laugh and say: 'These things are homebred with us.' I shall do the one thing they guard against — bring their sacred rites and mysteries into public, so that all the cunning by which they mock us simple folk may be laid open, that those who do not believe my denying voice may at least believe my convicting pen.

For this above all they guard against — that their writings should never be held against their own author. They easily speak with an oath, which afterwards they loosen by another perjury; at subscribing they shuffle and seek out subterfuges. One says: 'I cannot condemn what no one has condemned'; another: 'Nothing has been decreed about this by the Fathers,' so that, while the authority of the whole world is appealed to, the necessity of subscribing may be deferred. Certain ones more boldly say: 'How,' they say, 'shall we condemn what the Council of Nicaea did not touch? For the council which condemned Arius would surely have condemned Origen too, if it had reprobated his dogmas.' As if all diseases at once ought to have been cured with one medicine!

And therefore the majesty of the Holy Spirit is to be denied, because in that council there was silence concerning His substance. The question then was about Arius, not about Origen; about the Son, not about the Holy Spirit. They confessed what was being denied; they were silent about that which no one was asking. And yet, though he lay hidden, they struck Origen too, the fountain of Arius; for in condemning those who deny that the Son is of the substance of the Father, they condemned him equally with Arius. Otherwise, by this argument neither Valentinus nor Marcion nor the Cataphrygians nor Manichaeus ought to be condemned, because the Council of Nicaea does not name them — who certainly, there is no doubt, existed before the council.

But whenever they begin to be pressed, and must either subscribe or depart from the churches, you would see wondrous twists. So they temper their words, so they invert the order and patch together every ambiguity, that they may hold to both our confession and our adversaries', so that the heretic may hear one thing, the catholic another. As if it were not by the same spirit that the Delphic Apollo and Loxias poured out oracles to Croesus and to Pyrrhus at different times, but mocking them by an equal trick. For example's sake I will subjoin: 'We believe,' they say, 'in the future resurrection of bodies.' If this be well said, it is a pure confession.

But because there are heavenly and earthly bodies, and this air and the thin breath are, according to their nature, called bodies, they set down 'body,' not 'flesh,' so that the orthodox, hearing 'body,' may think of flesh, while the heretic recognizes spirit. This is their first snare; and if it be detected, they contrive other tricks and feign innocence and call us malicious, and, as though believing simply, they say: 'We believe in the resurrection of the flesh.' But when they have said this, the untaught crowd thinks it can suffice for them, especially because this very thing is believed also in the Creed. Question further: the noise of the ring is stirred up, their partisans cry out:

'You have heard "the resurrection of the flesh" — what more do you seek?' And with their zeal turned to perversity, we are called sycophants, they are called simple. But if you harden your brow and begin to press, holding the flesh with your fingers, and ask whether they say that this very flesh rises again — the flesh that is seen, that is touched, that walks and speaks — at first they laugh, then they nod assent.

And when we ask whether the resurrection will exhibit the hair and teeth, the breast and belly, the hands and feet and all the other limbs entire, then indeed they cannot contain themselves, but bursting their mouths into cackling laughter, they thrust upon us the need for barbers and cakes and physicians and cobblers, and moreover ask whether we believe that the genitals of both sexes rise again, that our cheeks will be shaggy and women's smooth, and that the constitution of the body will differ according to the distinction of male and female. And if we grant this, they at once demand the womb and coition and the rest of what is in the belly and beneath the belly. They deny the individual members, and yet say that the body, which consists of members, rises again. It is not the time now to hurl a rhetorical discourse against a perverse dogma.

Not the rich tongue of Cicero would suffice me, not the fervent oratory of Demosthenes could fill the fervour of my mind, if I wished to expose the frauds of the heretics, who, confessing the resurrection in word, deny it in mind. For their little women are wont to feel their breasts, to slap their bellies, to handle their loins and thighs and their smooth cheeks, and to say: 'What profit is it to us, if a frail body shall rise again? We shall be like the angels in the future, and we shall have the nature of angels.' Evidently they disdain to rise again with flesh and bones, with which Christ too rose again.

But suppose that I erred in my youth, and, trained in the studies of the philosophers — that is, of the pagans — was ignorant, at the beginning of my faith, of Christian doctrines, and thought to be in the apostles what I had read in Pythagoras and Plato and Empedocles: why do you follow the error of one who is a little child and a suckling in Christ? Why do you learn impiety from him who did not yet know piety? After shipwreck the second plank is to confess one's fault simply. You imitated one erring; imitate him also corrected. We erred as young men; let us be amended as old men. Let us join our groans, let us couple our tears, let us weep and turn to the Lord who made us; let us not await the repentance of the devil. That presumption is vain, and drags one down into the depth of Gehenna;

here either life is sought or it is lost. If I never followed Origen, you desire in vain to defame me; if I was his disciple, imitate one who repents. You believed me confessing; believe me also denying. 'If you knew these things,' he says, 'why did you praise him in your little works?' I would praise him even today, were you not praising his errors; his talent would not displease me, did not his impiety please certain persons. And the Apostle commands: reading all things, holding fast to those that are good. Lactantius in his books, and especially in the letters to Demetrianus, altogether denies the substance of the Holy Spirit, and by a Jewish error says that He is referred to the Father or to the Son, and that under His name the sanctification of both persons is signified.

Who can forbid me to read the books of his Institutes, in which he wrote most powerfully against the pagans, merely because the aforesaid opinion is to be detested? Apollinaris writes distinguished volumes against Porphyry: I approve the man's labour, though I despise a dogma foolish in many respects. Confess, you also, that Origen erred in certain things, and I will not mutter a word. Say that he thought ill of the Son, worse of the Holy Spirit; that he impiously brought forward the falls of souls from heaven; that he confesses the resurrection of the flesh in word only, but for the rest destroys it by his assertion; and that after many ages and one restitution of all things, that same Gabriel will be what the devil is, Paul what Caiaphas, virgins what harlots:

when you have rejected this and, as with a censor's rod, separated it from the faith of the Church, I shall safely read the rest and no longer fear the poisons, since I shall have drunk the antidote beforehand. It will not harm me if I say: Origen, though he conquered all men in his other books, in the Song of Songs conquered his own self; nor shall I dread the sentence by which, as a young man, I once named him a teacher of the churches. Unless perhaps I ought to have accused him whose little works I was translating at request, and to have said in the prologue: 'This man, whose books I interpret, is a heretic; beware, reader, lest you read. Flee the viper; or, if you wish to read, know that the things I have translated have been corrupted by wicked men and heretics. And yet you need not fear;

for I have corrected everything that was corrupted.' This is to say in other words: 'I, who translate, am a catholic; this man, whom I translate, is a heretic.' Finally, you too, simply enough and ingenuously and not maliciously, evidently making little account of rhetorical precepts and the tricks of orators, while you confess his books 'On First Principles' to be heretical, and wish to transfer the crime onto others, have injected a scruple into your readers, so that they discuss the author's whole life and from his other books form a conjecture of the present question;

but I, cunning fellow, who silently amended what I wished, and dissembling the crimes, cast no odium upon the criminal — even physicians say that great diseases are not to be cured, but to be left to nature, lest the remedy exasperate the sickness. It is nearly a hundred and fifty years since Origen fell asleep at Tyre. Who of the Latins ever dared to translate his books on the resurrection, 'On First Principles,' the Stromateis? Who wished to defame himself by an infamous work? We are neither more eloquent than Hilary nor more faithful than Victorinus, who translated his treatises not as interpreters but as authors of their own work. Recently Ambrose so compiled his Hexaemeron that he followed rather the opinions of Hippolytus and Basil.

I myself, whose rivals you say you are, and against whom you keep the eyes of moles and of goats fixed on me — if I had been of ill mind towards Origen, I would have translated those very books which I named above, so as to make his evils known to the Latins too; but I never did it, and, though many asked, I was unwilling to consent. For I am not wont to insult over the errors of those whose talents I admire. Origen himself, if he were still alive, would be angry with you, his partisans, and would say with Jacob: 'You have made me hateful in the world.' Does someone wish to praise Origen? Let him praise him as I praise: a great man from his infancy, and truly the son of a martyr, he held the ecclesiastical school at Alexandria, succeeding a most learned man, Clement the presbyter;

he so fled pleasures that, by a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, he cut off his genitals with iron; he trod down avarice; he held the Scriptures by memory, and in the study of expounding them he sweated by day and by night. He published a thousand and more treatises which he delivered in the church; besides these, innumerable commentaries, which he himself calls 'tomes,' and which I now pass over, lest I seem to be weaving an index of his works. Who of us can read as much as he wrote? Who does not marvel at a soul so ardent in the Scriptures? But if some zealot for wrangling should set against us his errors, let him hear freely: 'sometimes the great Homer nods; yet in a long work it is right to pardon slumber.'

Let us not imitate the vices of one whose virtues we cannot follow. Others too erred in the faith, both Greeks and Latins, whose names it is not necessary to bring forward, lest we seem to defend him not by his own merit but by the error of others. 'This,' you will say, 'is not to excuse Origen, but to accuse the rest.' Finely — if I did not say that he had erred, if in his depravity of faith I believed at least an apostle Paul or an angel from heaven should be heard; but now, since I simply confess his error, I read him as I read the rest, because he erred as the rest did. You will say: 'If the error is common to many, why do you persecute him alone?' Because you alone praise him as an apostle. Take away the excess of your love, and we take away the greatness of our hatred.

The vices of others you excerpt from their books only for this end, to defend this man's error; you so bear Origen to heaven that you say he erred in nothing. Whoever you are, champion of new dogmas, I beseech you, spare Roman ears, spare the faith which was praised by the voice of an apostle. Why, after four hundred years, do you strive to teach us what before we did not know? Why do you bring into the open what Paul and Peter were unwilling to publish? Up to this day the Christian world was without that teaching. That faith I, an old man, will hold, in which as a boy I was reborn. They call us Pelusiots and clay-bound and animal and carnal, because we do not receive the things which are of the spirit — they, forsooth, the men of Jerusalem, whose mother is in heaven.

I do not despise the flesh, in which Christ was both born and rose again; I do not scorn the clay, which, baked into the purest earthenware, reigns in heaven; and yet I marvel why, disparaging the flesh, they live carnally and cherish their own enemy and nourish it delicately — unless perhaps they wish to fulfil the Scripture which 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 is to be judged; I love that flesh which for Christ is cut, torn, burned in martyrdom. But as for what they assert, that his books have been violated by certain heretics and malevolent men, how foolish this is can be proved from the following.

Who more prudent, more learned, more eloquent than Eusebius and Didymus, the defenders of Origen, can be found? Of these the one, in six volumes of his Apology, confirms that Origen thought just as he himself thinks; the other so strives to excuse his errors that nevertheless he confesses them to be his, not denying that they were written, but expounding the meaning of the writing. It is another matter if Didymus defends, as though well said, the things which were added by heretics. Origen alone, forsooth, has been found, whose writings throughout the whole world were alike falsified, and, as though by the letters of Mithridates, all the truth was in one day scraped away from his volumes. If one book was violated, could all his works, which he published in diverse places and times, have been corrupted at once?

Origen himself, in the letter which he writes to Fabianus, bishop of the city of Rome, does penance for having written such things, and refers the causes of his rashness to Ambrose, because he brought into public what had been privately published: and certain men still argue theologically that the things which displease are another's! Furthermore, as to their bringing forward Pamphilus as his praiser, I give them thanks in my own name, that they have deemed me worthy to be slandered together with a martyr. For if you say his books were violated by the enemies of Origen, that he might be defamed, why is it not lawful for me to say that a volume was composed by his friends and followers under the name of Pamphilus, which would vindicate him from infamy by the testimony of a martyr?