THE MEMORANDUM OF PAULUS OROSIUS TO AURELIUS AUGUSTINE CONCERNING THE ERROR OF THE PRISCILLIANISTS AND ORIGENISTS. To the most blessed father Augustine the bishop, from Orosius. 1. I had indeed already suggested it to your holiness, but I was planning to offer a memorandum of the matter suggested at the time when I should have perceived that you were free in mind from your other necessities of dictation.
But since my lords, your sons, the bishops Eutropius and Paulus, moved by the same usefulness for the salvation of all as I, your boy, also was, have already given a memorandum concerning some of the heresies, yet have not indicated them all, it was necessary for me to publish in haste and to heap together into one all the trees of the perditions with their roots and branches, and to offer them to your fiery spirit, so that you, having seen the host and inspected the wickedness, may measure out what disposition of power you can apply. Do you only, most blessed father, pluck up and cut down the malicious plantings or graftings of others, and scatter true seed for us out of your fountains that are to water it.
I pledge God as my witness and hope for the increase of your work, because that land which now, by insincere cultivation, yields ungrateful fruits, if you shall have visited it by entrusting and replenishing it from that hidden manna stored up with you, will at length more freely, with abundance poured forth, prosper unto the hundredfold fruit. Through you may the Lord our God — through you, I say, blessed father — those whom He has chastised with the sword, may He amend with the word. To you I have been sent through God; concerning you I hope through Him, while I consider in what manner it came to pass that I came hither. I recognize why I have come: without will, without necessity, without consent I went forth from my homeland, driven by a certain hidden force, until I was borne to the shore of this land; here at last I came to my senses in this understanding, that I was bidden to come to you.
Judge me not shameless, if you receive me as one confessing. Make me a fit merchant for my beloved mistress, having found the pearl, not a fugitive servant returning with his substance squandered. We have been torn more grievously by depraved teachers than by the most bloody enemies. We confess the offense; you see through the wound clearly; what alone remains: with the Lord's help, bestow the medicine! Briefly therefore I will show both what was first ill-planted and grew strong, and what afterward, worse grafted, prevailed. 2. Priscillian, more wretched than the Manichaeans first in this, that he confirmed his heresy also from the Old Testament, teaching that the soul, which was born of God, proceeds from a certain storehouse, professes before God that it will fight, and is instructed by the adoration of angels:
thereafter, descending through certain circles, it is seized by the malign principalities and, according to the will of the conquering prince, is thrust into diverse bodies, and a bond is ascribed to them. Whence also he affirmed that astrology prevails, asserting that Christ loosed this bond and affixed it to the cross by His passion, even as Priscillian himself says in a certain letter of his: 'This is the first wisdom, in the types of souls to understand the natures of the divine powers and the disposition of the body, in which heaven seems bound and the earth and all the principalities of the world seem fettered; but the dispositions of the saints overcome them.'
'For the first circle and the divine bond of souls to be sent into the flesh, fashioned by the consents of the angels and of God and of all the souls, the patriarchs hold; who possess it against the work of the formal warfare,' and so on. Moreover he handed down that the names of the patriarchs are members of the soul, in that Reuben is in the head, Judah in the breast, Levi in the heart, Benjamin in the thighs, and the like;
but on the contrary, that the signs of heaven are disposed in the members of the body, that is, Aries in the head, Taurus in the neck, Gemini in the arms, Cancer in the breast, and the rest, wishing it to be understood that there are eternal darknesses, and that from these the prince of the world proceeded; and confirming this very thing from a certain book which is entitled 'The Memoir of the Apostles,' where the Savior seems to be questioned secretly by the disciples and to show, concerning the Gospel parable which has 'he went out sowing to sow,' that the sower was not good, asserting that, if he had been good, he would not have been negligent, nor would the seed have lain either by the wayside or in stony or in untilled places, wishing it to be understood that he is the sower who scattered captive souls into the diverse bodies that he willed.
In which book also many things are said concerning the prince of the moist things and the prince of fire, wishing it to be understood that all good things are done in this world by art, not by the power of God. For he says that there is a certain virgin of light, whom God, wishing to give rain to men, shows to the prince of the moist things; who, while he desires to seize her, being aroused, sweats and makes the rain, and, abandoned by her, with his bellowing stirs up thunders. The Trinity, moreover, he spoke of by word alone, for, asserting a unity without any existence or property, with the 'and' removed, he taught that the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, this is one Christ. 3. Then two fellow-citizens of mine, Avitus and another Avitus, when truth alone had now laid bare so foul a confusion by itself, sought foreign lands.
For one set out for Jerusalem, the other for Rome; on returning, one brought back Origen, the other Victorinus; of these two, the one yielded to the other: yet both condemned Priscillian. Victorinus we knew but little, because, almost even before his own editions, the follower of Victorinus yielded to Origen. There began therefore to be set forth from Origen many magnificent things, which from a slight occasion truth itself would cut away. For we learned a sufficiently sound doctrine concerning the Trinity, that all things which were made were made by God, and all things very good, and made from nothing; then thereafter sufficiently sober solutions of the Scriptures. All these were at once received by the wise with a faithful purging away of the former things; there remained only the offense concerning 'from nothing.'
For it had been persuaded that the soul exists, yet it could not be persuaded that it was made from nothing, men arguing that the will of God cannot be nothing. This remains almost until now. But these two Avitus, and with them the holy Basil, a Greek, who taught these things, most blessed one, handed down certain things from the books of Origen himself that were not correct, as now for the first time: first, that all things, before they appeared made, always remained made in the wisdom of God, saying it in this phrase: 'For whatever God made, in making He did not begin';
then they said that of angels, principalities, powers, souls, and demons there is one origin and one substance, and that a place was given, whether to an archangel or to a soul or to a demon, according to the quality of their merits, using this phrase: 'A lesser fault merited a greater place.' That the world was lastly made for this reason, that in it might be purged the souls which had sinned before; the eternal fire, indeed, by which sinners are punished, they preached to be neither true fire nor eternal, saying that the fire was called the punishment of one's own conscience, and that 'eternal,' according to the Greek etymology, is not perpetual, with a Latin testimony also added, because it was said 'unto the age' and 'into the age of the age,' having set 'the age' after 'the eternal':
and thus that all the souls of sinners, after the purgation of conscience, will return into the unity of the body of Christ. They also wished to assert concerning the devil, but did not prevail: namely that, since the good substance made in him cannot perish, after the malice of the devil is wholly burned out, the substance is at some time to be saved. Concerning the body of the Lord they handed down thus: that, since the Son of God, coming even unto us after so many thousands of years, was not until then idle, but preaching remission to the angels, the powers, and all the superior beings, while He assumed the quality of the form of those whom He visited, He thickened, even unto the palpability of the flesh, by the appearance of assumption:
determining this by His passion and resurrection, and again, until He should come unto the Father, by ascending He grew thin; so that the body was nowhere laid down, nor was God, reigning in any body, circumscribed. The creature also subjected to corruption not willingly, they said, was to be understood as the sun and the moon and the stars; and that these are not elemental brilliancies, but rational powers, and that they furnish service to corruption on account of Him who subjected it in hope. 4. These things, as I have been able to retain them, have been briefly set forth, so that, all the diseases having been inspected, you may hasten to apply the medicine.
The truth of Christ is in me, that on account of the venerable reverence for your holiness I would not dare to be shameless, unless by the evident judgment and ordination of God I recognized that you were chosen, and I was sent, to bring forth remedies for that so great and such a people, to whom, as to one sinning a plague has been laid on, so after the plague cure is due. Be mindful of me, most blessed father, and of the many who, together with me, await your eloquence as it were the dew, that it may descend upon them; deign to be so.