Let the prophetic word also come forth into the midst and proclaim the kingdom of Christ with all freedom: 'Rejoice, daughter of Zion; proclaim, daughter of Jerusalem; be glad and exult with your whole heart, daughter of Israel: the Lord has taken away your iniquities, he has redeemed you from the hand of your enemies; the King of Israel is in the midst of you, you shall see evil no more.' For neither those whom he has once saved will he again cast headlong from heaven and dismiss, according to the ravings and fables of Origen, so that from the heights they fall again. And this which is said:
'You shall see evil no more,' is a token of eternal security, that those who shall once have been set free and have fully enjoyed the possession of the kingdom of heaven, are by no means drawn down to earth by vices nor deprived of the help of God, who, according to the prophetic utterance, will set for them a wall and a rampart round about, surrounding them with his own power. Whence the psalmist also sings: 'He who dwells in Jerusalem shall not be moved for ever,' and the Lord attests: 'I will not leave you nor forsake you.' And in vain does he (Origen) dream that souls ascend into heaven and descend, and now advance, now slip down to lower things, so that through innumerable ruins they often die, and the passion of Christ is made void.
For he who once died for us gave us the eternal joy of his victory, which is diminished by no weight of vices. Nor does any man die repeatedly, which Origen dared to write, desiring to confirm the most impious dogma of the Stoics by the authority of the divine Scriptures. But why do we recall these things, when he has burst forth into such folly, nay madness, that he fastens yet another charge upon the Saviour, saying that he is to be nailed to the cross even for the demons and the spiritual wickednesses among those on high? Nor does he understand into how deep a pit of impiety he falls. For if Christ suffered for men, having become man, as the words of the Scriptures testify, it will be consequent that Origen should say:
'And he who is to suffer for the demons will become a demon.' For he will be compelled by necessity to infer this, lest he seem to be at variance with that which he began, and so that he may imitate the blasphemies of the Jews, whom he always imitates; for they too spoke to Christ in like manner: 'You have a demon,' and: 'By Beelzebul, the prince of demons, you cast out demons.' But far be it that Christ should suffer for the demons, lest he too become a demon. And those who believe this crucify afresh and hold up to open shame the Son of God, who, just as he took hold of the seed of Abraham, will by no means so assume also that of the demons, lest he be crucified for them too.
Nor will the demons, beholding God suffering for them, cry out with the prophet: 'This one has borne our sins and grieves for us,' nor will they say with Isaiah: 'By his stripes we are healed'; nor will Christ be led as a sheep to the victim for the demons as for the race of men, nor will it be said for their salvation: 'He spared not his own Son,' because neither will the demons cry out: 'He was delivered up for our sins and rose again for our justification.' Paul indeed writes plainly: 'For I delivered to you first that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,' calling them to witness and wishing by their authority to confirm that which is doubtful;
but Origen, without any testimony of the divine voice, strives to do violence to the truth and, with the lamp extinguished, to find it. A favourer of demons and not of men, he assails the Son of God with frequent calumnies and crucifies him anew, not understanding into how deep and horrible a gulf of impiety he is dragged down. For it is consequent that he who has taken up the former things should take up also those which follow; and he who has said that Christ is crucified for the demons should take up that it must be said also to those very demons: 'Take and eat; this is my body,' and: 'Take and drink; this is my blood.'
For if he is crucified also for the demons, as the asserter of these new dogmas affirms, what privilege or what reason will there be, that men alone should partake of his body and blood, and not the demons also, for whom in his passion he shed his blood? But neither will the demons hear: 'Take and eat,' and: 'Take and drink'; nor will the Lord dissolve his own precepts, who says to the disciples: 'Do not give what is holy to dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine, lest perchance they trample them under their feet and, turning, rend you.' For the apostle also, writing: 'I would not have you become partakers of demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.'
'You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons.' He shows that it is impossible for demons to drink of the Lord's cup and to share in His table. The food of the devil are those who deny God, as Habakkuk says: 'His food is choice'; but the abominable food of all the impious is the devil himself, as the prophet's oracle rings out: 'You gave him as food to the peoples of the Ethiopians.' From all these things it is proved that Christ cannot be crucified on behalf of demons, lest the demons become partakers of His body and blood. Therefore, since the Apostle also declares concerning the Savior: 'For this He did once for all, offering up Himself,' and Origen so audaciously contradicts that sentence, it is time to bring forward this:
'O earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord: write this man as disowned.' For what hell could receive such evils, what Tartarus could conceive of such things? What madness of the giants ever rose so rebelliously and built the tower of impiety? What wanton lust, perishing in the love of demons, thus spread apart the legs of its mind before every doctrine that passed by? Who drank so deeply of the vine of Sodom that, drunk with the wine of its fury, he fell down with his whole heart? Who, so drenched by the whirlpools of the rivers of Babylon, forsook the living fountains of Israel? Who, going forth from Jerusalem and becoming an imitator of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, built so many altars of errors and kindled profane incense upon them?
Why should not Dathan and Abiram, who sinned in lesser things, come before the tribunal of Christ and by comparison with themselves condemn this man, who outside the Church of the Savior filled the censers of diverse doctrines with diabolical fire? For neither did the Lord, who speaks through the prophet, 'I have multiplied visions, and in the hands of the prophets I have been likened,' teach him to bring forth adulterous doctrines; nor did those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word of God, nor the chorus of the prophets who of old were called 'seers,' instruct him in these things; but he himself, by the choice of his own mind serving the fury of demons and deceived by the flattering error of his thoughts, sent forth a flock and, so to speak, a swarm of perverse dogmas throughout the whole world into the minds of the untaught.
This is the one who opened his mouth to the Assyrian and Babylonian rivers, who tried to submerge the ship of the Church, laden with the good merchandise of saving doctrine, in the waves of his teaching, while he is exalted by the praise of the ignorant and, expounding the sense of the Scriptures otherwise than the truth holds it, glories in his own confusion. For who else composed books so innumerable, so garrulous, so full of wordiness and ignorance, and joined day to night with untiring zeal, only to deserve—leaving behind the monuments of his errors—to hear: 'You have been deceived by your many journeys'?
For he made use of an evil guide, popular applause, and having composed very many volumes of false knowledge and fighting with a mind rebellious against God, he mingled into the ointment of heavenly doctrines a certain corruption and the foulness of his own stench, so that it might again be said to his soul: 'Unclean and infamous and exceeding in iniquities.' For he would not hear the prophet warning: 'Why do you love vanity and seek after a lie?' He who fastens Christ to the cross on behalf of demons, that He may become the mediator not only of God and men, but of demons also. But far be it to believe so monstrous a wickedness concerning the Savior—that the temple of His body, which He deigned to raise up for us,
about to lose it, He should fasten to Himself another temple of demonic nature, so that, having received their likeness also, He might undergo the gallows on their behalf. I beseech you, most beloved brethren, that you pardon my grief as it resists impious doctrines. For while he strives to beat back the shamelessness of that man's followers, we have brought into the open the joints of his very breastplate and the frauds of his poisoned breast, so that this too might be fulfilled in him: 'I will reveal your shame and show it to your lovers.' For among other things he so corrupts and violates even the resurrection from the dead, which is the hope of our salvation, that he dares to say that our bodies are raised up again subject to corruption and death.
Answer me, O head of impiety: how, according to the Apostle Paul, did Christ conquer him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, if corruptible and mortal bodies are to rise again? What did the passion of Christ profit us, if death and corruption are once more to possess our bodies? Or what does the Apostle mean when he writes: 'For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive,' if cruel death is to rule over those who rise? Or how can those who believe such things say from the heart: 'Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God,' when they wish death to be stronger than He—death which will destroy the bodies raised by Him, and He is not shown to be conqueror in every part?
But against Origen, who so impiously resists, Christ our Lord both conquered death and by His own power destroyed the devil who had the power of death, having prepared for us in heaven the triumph of His victories. Nor did He raise up bodies for this end, that they should perish again, but by their perpetual incorruption He abolished death and corruption.
Wherefore, freed from all evils, let us celebrate the feast of the Lord's passion, and, according to the Gospel parable, seeing that oxen and fatlings are slain by Wisdom, let us feed on the stronger foods of doctrine, full of sinews and richer, so that, forsaking the milk of infancy, we may take more solid nourishment and flee ignorance, the cause of all evils—ignorance which, when it has bound the feet of many with diverse heresies, enjoys Origen as its greatest lover, who among other things dared to say that the Son must not be prayed to, nor the Father together with the Son, and after many ages renewed the blasphemy of Pharaoh, who said: 'Who is He, that I should hear His voice? I know not the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.' And to say 'I know not the Lord' is nothing other than what Origen says:
'The Son must not be prayed to'—the very One he certainly confesses as Lord. And although that man has burst forth into such open blasphemy, yet He must be prayed to, of whom the prophet testifies, saying: 'And they shall adore You, and in You shall they make supplication, for in You is God, and besides You there is no God'; and again: 'Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.' And Paul, disputing, says: 'How shall they call upon Him in whom they have not believed?' First one must believe that He is the Son of God, so that the invocation of Him may be right and consistent. And as He who is not God must not be prayed to, so on the contrary, He who is established to be God must be adored. Wherefore Stephen also, on bended knees and interceding for those who were overwhelming him with stones, said to the Son:
'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' Also, 'in the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.' And what is said—'every knee shall bow'—is a sign of anxious and most humble prayer. And so Origen does not even believe the Son of God to be God, since he thinks He must not be adored, and he tears Him with reproaches; and while he flatters himself with his memory of the Scriptures and thinks he understands them, he does not hear Moses speaking against him: 'The man who curses God shall bear his sin, and he who names the name of the Lord shall die the death; all the multitude shall overwhelm him with stones.' And who afflicts Christ with such great insults as this man, who dared to say 'He must not be prayed to,' granting Him only an empty name of divinity?
But what need is there to linger among things so impious? Let us pass to another of his errors. He says that the bodies which rise again, after many ages, are to be dissolved into nothing and will be nothing—except when the souls, having slipped down from the mansions of heaven to lower regions, shall need new bodies, which arise again in place of the former ones now utterly destroyed. Who, hearing these things, would not tremble both in mind and body? For if after the resurrection the bodies are to be reduced to nothing, the second death will be stronger than the first, since it will be able to destroy bodily substance altogether. Why does Paul write: 'Death shall no more have dominion over Him; for in that He died to sin, He died once,' if bodies are to be utterly destroyed?
Or how will that which is said—'once'—be firm, when the flesh, separated from fellowship with the soul, is to be reduced to nothing? For what reason did he further add: 'It is sown in corruption, it rises in incorruption; it is sown in weakness, it rises in power; it is sown in dishonor, it rises in glory; it is sown a natural body, it rises a spiritual body'? For if incorruption reduces bodies to nothing, it would have been consistent to say that they are reserved to corruption forever, and corruption would be stronger than incorruption. But far be it that Paul should write things contrary to himself, and that incorruption and corruption should be of the same nature.
But if, as Origen falsely thinks, not only the corruptible but also the mortal body is to be raised, then corruption and incorruption, death and life, will be called one and the same thing; they will have the same power in the raised bodies, and corruption and incorruption, death and life, will be distinguished in no way in reality, but only in name. But if the corruptible and mortal body is to rise, it would have been more consistent for the Apostle to say: 'It is sown in corruption, it rises in corruption; it is sown in weakness, it rises in weakness; it is sown in dishonor, it rises in dishonor; it is sown a natural body, it rises a natural body.'
But if he removes corruption, weakness, and dishonor from the raised bodies and says, on the contrary, that the bodies are to be clothed with incorruption, strength, and glory, and that in place of a natural body a spiritual body is to be rendered, then death will be abolished, and in the raised bodies, in place of death and corruption, immortality and incorruption shall reign, because the body itself will rise immortal and incorrupt, so that it may be able to remain coeternal with the soul. Therefore the Savior also, granting to our bodies the pledge of our salvation in the resurrection of His own body, cannot be believed to be about to die any more, the Apostle agreeing with this judgment:
'Christ, rising from the dead, dies no more; death shall no more have dominion over Him'—lest, if it had dominion over Him, it should have dominion over us. Let Origen be confounded among the other kinds of outrages which he invents, granting patronage even to the magic arts. For in his treatises he spoke in these words: 'The magic art does not seem to me to be the name of any subsisting thing; but even if it exists, it is not the work of evil, nor something that can be held in contempt.' In saying these things he certainly shows himself a supporter of Elymas the magician, who resisted the Apostles, and of Jannes and Jambres, who withstood Moses by magic arts. But Origen's patronage will have no strength, because Christ destroyed the illusions of the magicians by His coming.
Let this asserter of a new impiety answer—nay rather, let him openly hear: if the magic art is not evil, neither will idolatry be evil, which rests upon the powers of the magic art. But if idolatry is evil, the magic art also will be evil, out of which idolatry subsists. And since idolatry has been destroyed by the majesty of Christ, this shows that its parent, the magic art, has likewise been dissolved together with it, the prophet clearly proclaiming concerning this: 'Stand now with your enchantments and with the multitude of your sorceries which you have learned from your youth, if perhaps they may profit you.'
Since therefore these writings of the prophets bear witness, and no one ever dared to hand down to memory that the arts of the magicians are to be numbered among the best things, and the public laws also punish magicians and evildoers, I cannot know by what reasoning Origen—who boasts that he is a Christian—was impelled to become an imitator of the false prophet Zedekiah and to make for himself horns of iron, armed with which he might advance against the doctrines of truth, and to have no wisdom about the heavenly Jerusalem, nor to imitate Moses and Daniel and Peter and the other saints, who, standing as it were in battle-line against the magicians and enchanters, conquered nature untiring; yet the Babylonian fire has not prevailed against us, nor were our hairs singed—namely the outermost doctrines of ecclesiastical truth—nor were our breeches changed, which wisdom wove for us out of the testimonies of Holy Scripture for the protection of souls, nor is the smell of fire upon us, the flame of perverse knowledge running through.
For we have not acquiesced in his teaching, who supposes that bodies were made on account of the fall of rational creatures and says, according to the etymology of the Greek word, that souls (psychai) were so called because they lost the warmth of mind and of most fervent charity toward God, so that they took their name from cold—lest we should feel that the soul of the Savior also lay subject to the same nonsense. We also do not assert that the courses of the sun and moon and stars, and the most beautiful harmony of the whole world in its diversity, came about from preceding causes and various sins and vices of souls; nor that the goodness of God waited a long time, so as not to make the visible creatures earlier, unless the invisible ones had first sinned.
Nor do we call bodily substance vanity, as he supposes—yielding in other words to the tenets of Manichaeus—lest even the body of Christ should be subject to vanity, by feeding on which, being filled, we daily ruminate the words of Him who says: 'Unless one eat My flesh and drink My blood, he shall have no part with Me.' For if bodily nature is vain and futile according to Origen's error, why did Christ rise from the dead, why did He raise up our bodies, what does Paul mean when he writes: 'If the dead rise not, neither is Christ risen; and if Christ be not risen, our faith is vain'? From which it is clear that the nature of bodies is not vanity, but that those believe in vanity who do not think it rises again and remains forever.
He also condemns honorable marriage, denying that bodies subsist unless the souls have first sinned in heaven and thence, cast down, have been bound as it were in certain prisons of bodies. And let him indeed think as he will and speak as he does not fear: let him hear us crying aloud with Paul into his very ears, 'Marriage is honorable and the bed undefiled.' And how undefiled, if the soul, sordid with vices, is surrounded by flesh? It would even be subject to guilt! Hannah, the wife of Elkanah, asking for the seed of men—that on account of the desire of a little woman, souls in heaven should be imperiled, and one of them, heavy with sin, should slip to earth and forsake its former blessedness. Nor Moses, imprecating and saying:
'The Lord your God multiply you, and behold, you are this day as the stars of heaven in multitude. The Lord God of your fathers add to you, as you are, a thousand times, and bless you, as He has spoken'—did he ask this, that hosts of souls sinning in heaven should found the nation of the people of Israel? How plainly discrepant it evidently is, that he who prayed for the sin of the people—'If You forgive this sin to the people, forgive; but if not, blot me out of the book which You have written'—should ask that the sons of Israel be multiplied; whom, if he had known that they grew by the ruin of souls, would he not on the contrary have prayed that a lower nature not be founded on account of the vices of a better substance? Why does David imprecate in the psalm:
'The Lord bless you out of Zion, and may you see the good things of Jerusalem all the days of your life, and may you see your children's children'—if the race of a righteous man is increased by the sin of souls, and dares to say: 'Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord,' when he knows that offending souls are bound with the chains of bodies and in a prison of this kind pay by the judgment of God the penalties of their sins? How does God speak through the prophet: 'If you had heard My precepts, your peace would surely have been as a river and your righteousness as the waves of the sea, and your seed as the sand and the offspring of your womb as the dust of the earth'?
For those who keep the precepts of God ought not to receive as a reward the falls of souls from heaven, which, bound to bodies, multiply the increase of their offspring. But if they wish to learn what are the beginnings of the human race, let them hear Moses saying: 'God took of the earth and formed man and breathed into his face the spirit of life, and man became a living soul,' that is, immortal. God also, blessing Adam and Eve, said: 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth.' If souls are sent into the earth after sin, to be born in bodies, it was not reasonable to bless Adam and Eve, since on account of the cause of sin they would rather deserve a curse.
Finally, after He had formed them, He followed them with words of blessing—those whom afterwards, sinning by their own will, He struck with a curse. From which it is gathered that the nature of bodies did not come to exist on account of the sins of souls. Let them hear again God saying: 'I made the earth and man upon it,' and David: 'The heaven of heavens is the Lord's, but the earth He has given to the sons of men'; and let them cease any longer to follow the errors of their own imaginings and rather be led by the authority of the Scriptures.
For just as those who are enervated by pleasures and in whose breast lust holds dominion, contemplating the comeliness of bodies, seek not the beauty of character but of limbs, and their sense, weighed down by earthly dregs, gazes on nothing higher—so those who are led by the elaborate composition of words and, captured by the sound of eloquence, do not perceive the truth of doctrines, blush to confess their former error, and, blinded by the swelling of arrogance, refuse to be disciples, lest, after they have been corrected, they should be seen to have erred before.
Therefore, having cast off the evils of Origen and passed over the snares of the Scriptures which are called apocrypha, that is, hidden—'for I have not spoken in hiding,' says the Lord—again and again, dearest brethren, let us celebrate the feast of the Lord's passion; adorning our faith by our manner of life, let us imitate God in mercy toward the poor, God to whom no form of bodily natures is similar; let us have in all things the image of His goodness; let us amend our errors by penitence; let us pray for our enemies, let us intercede for our detractors, emulating Moses, who by prayer blotted out the fault of his sister who spoke against him; let us wash away the filth of sins with the oil of almsgiving.
Let the chains of captives seem to bind us, and let us implore God to be merciful to them; let daily kindness sustain those shut up in prison, and let us serve with anxious ministry those whose bodies the royal disease has seized and whose limbs are dissolved by constant wasting, on account of the reward laid up in heaven. If ever the power of judgment be given to us and the cause of quarreling brethren be brought to us, let there be no respect of persons, but of the matters. Let us fall in affection also with those who are falling and set in tribulation; let the laws hold the standard of truth; let charity be inclined to mercy, not insulting sinners but suffering with them;
for the fall into vices is easy, and such is the fragility of the human condition, that whatever one sees in another, he ought to fear in himself. And when another has been rebuked for his error, let that man's amendment be our caution. And above all, as the summit and crown of the virtues, let piety toward God be kept with all the fear of the heart; and detesting the number of gods, let us confess of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit one and undivided substance, in which, being baptized, we have received eternal life.
And, if the clemency of God shall grant it, we shall be worthy with the angels to celebrate the Lord's Pasch, having the beginning of Lent from the eighth day of the month which according to the Egyptians is called Phamenoth; and, He supplying the strength, let us fast more attentively, laying the foundations of the greater week—that is, of the venerable Pasch—on the thirteenth day of the month Pharmuthi, in such a way, however, that according to the evangelical traditions we end our fasts in the dead of night on the eighteenth day of the said month Pharmuthi; and on the following day, which is the symbol of the Lord's resurrection, that is, the nineteenth of the same month, let us celebrate the true Pasch, adding to these the seven remaining weeks in which the festivity of Pentecost is woven, and presenting ourselves worthy of the communion of the body and blood of Christ.
For thus shall we be worthy to receive the kingdom of heaven in Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom and with whom to God the Father be glory and dominion, with the Holy Spirit, both now and always and unto all ages of ages. Amen. Greet one another with a holy kiss; the brethren who are with me greet you. XCVII. TO PAMMACHIUS AND MARCELLA. Again I enrich you with Eastern merchandise and send Alexandrian riches to Rome in the first spring. 'God shall come from the south, and the Holy One from Mount Paran, a thick shadow'; whence also the bride rejoices in the Song of Songs, saying: 'In His shadow I desired and sat down, and His fruit is sweet in my throat.' Truly now is fulfilled the oracle of Isaiah proclaiming:
'In that day there shall be an altar of the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt,' so that where sin abounded, grace might superabound. Those who had cherished the infant Christ now, when He is grown, defend Him with the warmth of faith, so that He who through them escaped the hands of Herod may escape the blaspheming heretic. Whom Demetrius drove out of the city of Alexandria, Theophilus puts to flight throughout the whole world—Theophilus, to whom Luke wrote his Gospel, who from the love of God found his name. Where now is the twisting serpent? Where the most venomous viper, the first face of man committed to the belly of wolves? Where the heresy that hissed in the world and boasted both me and Pope Theophilus as belonging to its error, and by the barking of most shameless dogs falsely claimed our assent for the leading astray of the simple?