Book I (part 2 of 2)

There is no crime surely in this exposition of the passage. Origen explained it in a heterodox sense, but I followed that of the church. And, since it is the duty of a commentator to record the opinions expressed by many others, and I had promised in the Preface that I would do this, I set down Origen's interpretation, though without mentioning his name which excites ill will.

"Another," I said, "who wishes to vindicate the justice of God, and to shew that he does not choose men according to a prejudgment and foreknowledge of his own but according to the deserts of the elect, thinks that before the visible creation of sky, earth, sea and all that is in them, there existed the invisible creation, part of which consisted of souls, which, for certain causes known to God alone, were cast down into this valley of tears, this scene of our affliction and our pilgrimage; and that it is to this that we may apply the Psalmist's prayer, he being in this low condition and longing to return to his former dwelling place:³⁰⁴³ "Woe is me that my sojourn is prolonged; I have inhabited the habitations of Kedar, my soul hath had a long pilgrimage." And also the words of the Apostle:³⁰⁴⁴ "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" and³⁰⁴⁵ "It is better to return and to be with Christ;" and³⁰⁴⁶ "Before I was brought low, I sinned." He adds much more of the same kind."

Now observe that I said "Another who wishes to vindicate," I did not say "who succeeds in vindicating." But if you find a stumbling block in the fact that I condensed a very long discussion of Origen's into a brief statement so as to give the reader a glimpse of his meaning; if you declare me to be a secret adherent of his because I have not left out anything which he has said, I would ask you whether it was not necessary for me to do this, so as to avoid your cavils. Would you not otherwise have declared that I had kept silence on matters on which he had spoken boldly, and that in the Greek text his assertions were much stronger than I represented? I therefore put down all that I found in the Greek text, though in a shorter form, so that his disciples should have nothing which they could force upon the ears of the Latins as a new thing; for it is easier for us to make light of things which we know well than of things which take us unprepared. But after I had shewn Origen's interpretations of the passage, I concluded this section with words to which I beg your attention:

"The Apostle does not say He chose us before the foundation of the world because we were then holy and without blemish;' but He chose us that we might be holy and without blemish,' that is, that we who before were not holy and without blemish might afterwards become such. This expression will apply even to sinners who turn to better things; and thus the words remain true, In thy sight shall no man living be justified,' that is, no one in his whole life, in the whole of the time that he has existed in the world. If the passage be thus understood, it makes against the opinion that before the foundation of the world certain souls were elected because of their holiness, and that they had none of the corruption of sinners. It is evident that Paul and those like him were not elected because they were holy and without blemish, but they were elected and predestinated so that in their after life, by means of their works and their virtues, they should become holy and without blemish."

Does any one dare, then, after this statement of my opinion, to accuse me of assent to the heresy of Origen? It is now almost eighteen years since I composed those books, at a time when the name of Origen was highly esteemed in the world, and when as yet his work the Peri 'Archon had not reached the ears of the Latins: and yet I distinctly stated my belief and pointed out what I did not agree with. Hence, even if my opponent could have pointed out anything heretical in other places, I should be held guilty only of the fault of carelessness, not of the perverse doctrines which both in this place and in my other works I have condemned.

23. I will deal shortly with the second passage which my brother tells me has been marked for blame, because the complaint is exceedingly frivolous, and bears on its face its calumnious character. The passage³⁰⁴⁷ is that in which Paul declares that God "made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world but also in that which is to come." After stating various expositions which have been given, I came to the offices of the ministers of God, and spoke of the principalities and powers, the virtues and dominions: and I add:

"They must assuredly have others who are subject to them, who are under their power and serve them, and are fortified by their authority: and this distribution of offices will exist not only in the present world but in the world to come, so that each individual will rise or fall from one step of advancement and honour to another, some ascending and some descending, and will come successively under each of these powers, virtues, principalities, and dominions."

I then went on to describe the various divine offices and ministries after the similitude of the palace of an earthly king, which I fully described; and I added:

"Can we suppose that God the Lord of lords and King of kings, is content with a single order of servants? We speak of an archangel because there are other angels of whom he is chief: and so there would be nothing said of Principalities, Powers and Dominions unless it were implied that there were others of inferior rank."

But, if he thinks that I became a follower of Origen because I mentioned in my exposition these advancements and honours, these ascents and descents, increasings and diminishings; I must point out that to say, as Origen does, that Angels and Cherubim and Seraphim are turned into demons and men, is a very different thing from saying that the Angels themselves have various offices allotted to them,—a doctrine which is not repugnant to that of the church. Just as among men there are various degrees of dignity distinguished by the different kinds of work, as the bishop, the presbyter and the other Ecclesiastical grades have each their own order, while yet all are men; so we may believe that, while they all retain the dignity of Angels, there are various degrees of eminence among them, without imagining that angels are changed into men, and that men are new-made into angels.

24. A third passage with which he finds fault is that in which I gave a threefold interpretation of the Apostle's words:³⁰⁴⁸ "That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus." The first was my own opinion, the second the opposite opinion held by Origen, the third the simple explanation given by Apollinarius. As to the fact that I did not give their names, I must ask for pardon on the ground that it was done through modesty. I did not wish to disparage men whom I was partly following. and whose opinions I was translating into the Latin tongue. But, I said, the diligent reader will at once search into these things and form his own opinion. And I repeated at the end: Another turns to a different sense the words That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace.' "Ah," you will say, "I see that in the character of the diligent reader you have unfolded the opinions of Origen." I confess that I was wrong. I ought to have said not The diligent but The blasphemous reader. If I had anticipated that you would adopt measures of this kind I might have done this, and so have avoided your calumnious speeches. It is, I suppose, a great crime to have called Origen a diligent reader, especially when I had translated seventy books of his and had praised him up to the sky,—for doing which I had to defend myself in a short treatise³⁰⁴⁹ two years ago in answer to your trumpeting of my praises. In those praises' which you gave me you laid it to my charge that I had spoken of Origen as a teacher of the churches, and now that you speak in the character of an enemy you think that I shall be afraid because you accuse me of calling him a diligent reader. Why, even shopkeepers who are particularly frugal, and slaves who are not wasteful, and the care-takers who made our childhood a burden to us and even thieves when they are particularly clever, we speak of as diligent; and so the conduct of the unjust steward in the Gospel is spoken of as wise. Moreover³⁰⁵⁰ "The children of this world are wiser than the children of light," and³⁰⁵¹ "The serpent was wiser than all the beasts which the Lord had made on the earth."

25. The fourth ground of his censure is in the beginning of my Second Book, in which I expounded the statement which St. Paul makes "For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles." The passage in itself is perfectly plain; and I give, therefore, only that part of the comment on it which lends itself to malevolent remark:

"The words which describe Paul as the prisoner of Jesus Christ for the Gentiles may be understood of his martyrdom, since it was when he was thrown into chains at Rome that he wrote this Epistle, at the same time with those to Philemon and the Colossians and the Philippians, as we have formerly shewn. Certainly we might adopt another sense, namely, that, since we find this body in several places called the chain of the soul, in which it is held as in a close prison, Paul may speak of himself as confined in the chains of the body, and so that he could not return and be with Christ; and that thus he might perfectly fulfil his office of preaching to the Gentiles. Some commentators, however, introduce another idea, namely, that Paul, having been predestinated and consecrated from his mother's womb, and before he was born, to be a preacher to the Gentiles, afterwards took on the chains of the flesh."

Here also, as before, I gave a three fold exposition of the passage: in the first my own view, in the second the one supported by Origen, and the third the opinion of Apollinarius going contrary to his doctrine. Read over the Greek commentaries. If you do not find the fact to be as I state it, I will confess that I was wrong. What is my fault in this passage? The same, I presume, as that to which I made answer before, namely, that I did not name those whose views I quoted. But it was needless at each separate statement of the Apostle to give the names of the writers whose works I had declared in the Preface that I meant to translate. Besides, it is not an absurd way of understanding the passage, to say that the soul is bound in the body until Christ returns and, in the glory of the resurrection, changes our corruptible and mortal body for incorruption and immortality: for it is in this sense that the Apostle uses the expression, "O wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" calling it the body of death because it is subject to vices and diseases, to disorders and to death; until it rises with Christ in glory, and, having been nothing but fragile clay before, becomes baked by the heat of the holy Spirit into a jar of solid consistency, thus changing its grade of glory, though not its nature.

26. The fifth passage selected by him for blame is the most important, that in which I explain the statement of the Apostle.³⁰⁵² "From whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through every juncture of ministration, according to the working in due measure of every several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love." Here I summed up in a short sentence Origen's exposition which is very long and goes over the same ideas in various words, yet so as to leave out none of his illustrations or his assertions. And when I had come to the end, I added:

"And so in the restitution of all things, when Jesus Christ the true physician comes to restore to health the whole body of the Church, which now lies scattered and rent, every one will receive his proper place according to the measure of his faith and his recognition of the Son of God (the word recognize' implies that he had formerly known him and afterwards had ceased to know him), and shall then begin to be what he once had been; yet not in such a way as that, as held by another heresy, all should be placed in one rank, and, by a renovating process, all become angels; but that each member, according to its own measure and office shall become perfect: for instance, that the apostate angel shall begin to be that which he was by his creation, and that man who had been cast out of paradise shall be restored again to the cultivation of paradise;" and so on.

27. I wonder that you with your consummate wisdom have not understood my method of exposition. When I say, But not in such a way that, as held by another heresy, all should be placed in one rank, that is, all by a reforming process become angels,' I clearly shew that the things which I put forward for discussion are heretical, and that one heresy differs from the other. Which (do you ask?) are the two heresies? The one is that which says that all reasonable creatures will by a reforming process become angels; the other, that which asserts that in the restitution of the world each thing will become what it was originally created; as for instance that devils will again become angels, and that the souls of men will become such as they were originally formed; that is, by the reforming process will become not angels but that which God originally made them, so that the just and the sinners will be on an equality. Finally, to shew you that it was not my own opinion which I was developing but two heresies which I was comparing with one another, both of which I had found stated in the Greek, I completed my discussion with this ending:

"These things, as I have said before, are more obscure in our tongue because they are put in a metaphorical form in Greek; and in every metaphor, when a translation is made word for word from one language into another, the budding sense of the word is choked as it were with brambles."

If you do not find in the Greek the very thought which I have expressed, I give you leave to treat all that I say as my own.

28. The sixth and last point which I am told that he brings against me (that is if my brother has not left anything unreported) is that, in the interpretation of the Apostle's words,³⁰⁵³ "He that loveth his wife loveth himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ also the church," after my own simple explanation I propounded the question raised by Origen, speaking his views though without mentioning his name, and saying:

"I may be met by the objection that the statement of the Apostle is not true when he says that no man hates his own flesh, since those who labour under the jaundice or consumption or cancer or abscesses, prefer death to life, and hate their own bodies;" and my own opinion follows immediately: "The words, therefore, may be more properly taken in a metaphorical sense."

When I say metaphorical, I mean to shew that what is said is not actually the case, but that the truth is shadowed forth through a mist of allegory. However, I will set out the actual words which are found in Origen's third book: "We may say that the soul loves that flesh which is to see the salvation of God, that it nourishes and cherishes it, and trains it by discipline and satisfies it with the bread of heaven, and gives it to drink of the blood of Christ: so that it may become well-liking through wholesome food, and may follow its husband freely, without being weighed down by any weakness. It is by a beautiful image that the soul is said to nourish and cherish the body as Christ nourishes and cherishes the church, since it was he who said to Jerusalem:³⁰⁵⁴

"How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings and thou wouldst not;" and that thus this corruptible may put on incorruption, and that being poised lightly, as upon wings, may rise more easily into the air. Let us men then cherish our wives, and let our souls cherish our bodies in a way as that wives may be turned into men and bodies into spirits, and that there may be no difference of sex, but that, as among the angels there is neither male nor female, so we, who are to be the Angels, may begin to be here what it is promised that we shall be in heaven."

29. The simple explanation of my own opinion in reference to the passage I stated before in these words:

"Taking the simple sense of the words, we have a command, following on the precept of mutual kindness between man and wife, that we should nourish and cherish our wives: that is, that we should supply them with the food and clothing which are necessary."

This is my own understanding of the passage. Consequently, my words imply that all that follows after and might be brought up against me must be understood as spoken not as my own view but that of my opponents. But it might be thought that my resolution of the difficulty of the passage is too short and peremptory, and that it wraps the true sense, according to what has been said above, in the darkness of allegory, so as to bring it down from its true meaning to one less true. I will therefore come nearer to the matter, and ask what there is in the other interpretation with which you need disagree. It is this I suppose, that I said that souls should cherish their bodies as men cherish their wives, so that this corruptible may put on incorruption, and that, being lightly poised as upon wings, it may rise more easily into the air. When I say that this corruptible must put on incorruption, I do not change the nature of the body, but give it a higher rank in the scale of being. And so as regards what follows, that, being lightly poised as upon wings, it may more easily rise into the air: He who gets wings, that is, immortality, so that he may fly more lightly up to heaven, does not cease to be what he had been. But you may say, I am staggered by what follows:

"Let us men then cherish our wives, and let our souls cherish our bodies, in such a way as that wives may be turned into men and bodies into spirits, and that there may be no difference of sex, but that, as among the angels there is neither male nor female, so we, who are to be like the angels, may begin to be on earth what it is promised that we shall be in heaven."

You might justly be staggered, if I had not, after what goes before, said "We may begin to be what it is promised that we shall be in heaven." When I say, "We shall begin to be on earth," I do not take away the difference of sex; I only take away lust, and sexual intercourse, as the Apostle does when he says, "The time is short; it remaineth therefore that those who have wives be as though they had none;" and as the Lord implied when, in reply to the question of which of the seven brothers the woman would be the wife, he answered:³⁰⁵⁵ "Ye err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God; for in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage: but they shall be as the angels of God." And, indeed, when chastity is observed between man and woman, it begins to be true that there is neither male nor female; but, though living in the body, they are being changed into angels, among whom there is neither male nor female. The same is said by the same Apostle in another place:³⁰⁵⁶ "As many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

30. But now, since my pleading has steered its course out of these rough and broken places, and I have refuted the charge of heresy which had been urged against me by looking my accuser freely in the face, I will pass on to the other articles of charge with which he tries to assail me. The first is that I am a scurrilous person, a detractor of every one; that I am always snarling and biting at my predecessors. I ask him to name a single person whose reputation I have disparaged, or whom, according to an art practised by my opponent, I have galled by pretended praise. But, if I speak against ill-disposed persons, and wound with the point of my pen some Luscius Lanuvinus³⁰⁵⁷ or an Asinius Pollio of the race of the Cornelii,³⁰⁵⁸ if I repel the attacks of a man of boastful and curious spirit, and aim all my shafts at a single butt, why does he divide with others the wounds meant for him alone? And why is he so unwise as to shew, by the irritation of his answer to my attack, his consciousness that it is he alone whom the cap fits?

He brings against me the charge of perjury and sacrilege together, because, in a book written for the instruction of one of Christ's virgins, I describe the promise which I once made when I dreamed that I was before the tribunal of the Judge, that I would never again pay attention to secular literature, and that nevertheless I have sometimes made mention of the learning which I then condemned. I think that I have here lighted on the man who, under the name of Sallustianus Calpurnius, and through the letter written to me by the orator Magnus, raised a not very³⁰⁵⁹ great question. My answer on the general subject is contained in the short treatise which I then wrote to him.³⁰⁶⁰ But at the present moment I must make answer as to the sacrilege and perjury of my dream. I said that I would thenceforward read no secular books: it was a promise for the future, not the abolition of my memory of the past. How, you may ask me, can you retain what you have been so long without reading? I must give my answer by recurring to one of these old books:³⁰⁶¹

'Tis much to be inured in tender youth.

But by this mode of denial I criminate myself; for bringing Virgil as my witness I am accused by my own defender. I suppose I must weave a long web of words to prove what each man is conscious of. Which of us does not remember his infancy? I shall make you laugh though you are a man of such extreme gravity; and you will have at last to do as Crassus did, who, Lucilius tells us, laughed but once in his life, if I recount the memories of my childhood: how I ran about among the offices where the slaves worked; how I spent the holidays in play; or how I had to be dragged like a captive from my grandmother's lap to the lessons of my enraged Orbilius.³⁰⁶² You may still more be astonished if I say that, even now that my head is gray and bald, I often seem in my dreams to be standing, a curly youth, dressed in my toga, to declaim a controversial thesis before the master of rhetoric; and, when I wake, I congratulate myself on escaping the peril of making a speech. Believe me, our infancy brings back to us many things most accurately. If you had had a literary education, your mind would retain what it was originally imbued with as a wine cask retains its scent. The purple dye on the wool cannot be washed out with water. Even asses and other brutes know the inns they have stopped at before, however long the journey may have been. Are you astonished that I have not forgotten my Latin books when you learnt Greek without a master? I learned the seven forms of Syllogisms in the Elements of logic; I learned the meaning of an Axiom, or as it might be called in Latin a Determination; I learned how every sentence must have in it a verb and a noun; how to heap up the steps of the Sorites,³⁰⁶³ how to detect the clever turns of the Pseudomenos³⁰⁶⁴ and the frauds of the stock sophisms. I can swear that I never read any of these things after I left school. I suppose that, to escape from having what I learned made into a crime, I must, according to the fables of the poets, go and drink of the river Lethe. I summon you, who accuse me for my scanty knowledge, and who think yourself a litérateur and a Rabbi, tell me how was it that you dared to write some of the things you have written, and to translate Gregory,³⁰⁶⁵ that most eloquent man, with a splendour of eloquence like his own? Whence have you obtained that flow of words, that lucidity of statement, that variety of translations,—you who in youth had hardly more than a first taste of rhetoric? I must be very much mistaken if you do not study Cicero in secret. I suspect that, being yourself so cultivated a person, you forbid me under penalties the reading of Cicero, so that you may be left alone among our church writers to boast of your flow of eloquence. I must say, however, that you seem rather to follow the philosophers, for your style is akin to that of the thorny sentences of Cleanthes³⁰⁶⁶ and the contortions of Chrysippus,³⁰⁶⁷ not from any art, for of that you say you are ignorant, but from the sympathy of genius. The Stoics claim Logic as their own, a science which you despise as a piece of fatuity; on this side, therefore, you are an Epicurean, and the principle of your eloquence is, not style but matter. For, indeed, what does it matter that no one else understands what you wish to say, when you write for your own friends alone, not for all? I must confess that I myself do not always understand what you write, and think that I am reading³⁰⁶⁸ Heraclitus; however I do not complain, nor lament for my sluggishness; for the trouble of reading what you write is not more than the trouble you must have in writing it.

31. I might well reply as I have done even if it were a question of a promise made with full consciousness. But this is a new and shameless thing; he throws in my teeth a mere dream. How am I to answer? I have no time for thinking of anything outside my own sphere. I wish that I were not prevented from reading even the Holy Scriptures by the throngs that beset this place, and the gathering of Christians from all parts of the world. Still, when a man makes a dream into a crime, I can quote to him the words of the Prophets, who say that we are not to believe dreams; for even to dream of adultery does not condemn us to hell, and to dream of the crown of martyrdom does not raise us to heaven. Often I have seen myself in dreams dead and placed in the grave: often I have flown over the earth and been carried as if swimming through the air, over mountains and seas. My accuser might, therefore, demand that I should cease to live, or that I should have wings on my shoulders, because my mind has often been mocked in sleep by vague fancies of this kind. How many people are rich while asleep and wake to find themselves beggars! or are drinking water to cool their thirst, and wake up with their throats parched and burning! You exact from me the fulfilment of a promise given in a dream. I will meet you with a truer and closer question: Have you done all that you promised in your baptism? Have you or I fulfilled all that the profession of a monk demands? I beg you, think whether you are not looking at the mote in my eye through the beam in your own. I say this against my will; it is by sorrow that my reluctant tongue is forced into words. As to you, it is not enough for you to make up charges about my waking deeds, but you must accuse me for my dreams. You have such an interest in my actions that you must discuss what I have said or done in my sleep. I will not dwell on the way in which, in your zeal to speak against me, you have besmirched your own profession, and have done all you can by word and deed for the dishonouring of the whole body of Christians. But I give you fair warning, and will repeat it again and again. You are attacking a creature who has horns: and, if it were not that I lay to heart the words of the Apostle³⁰⁶⁹ "The evil speakers³⁰⁷⁰ shall not inherit the kingdom of God," and³⁰⁷¹ "By hating one another you have been consumed one of another," I would make you feel what a vast discord you have stirred up after a slight and pretended reconciliation. What advantage is it to you to heap up slanders against me both among friends and strangers? Is it because I am not an Origenist, and do not believe that I sinned in heaven, that I am accused as a sinner upon earth? And was the result of our renewal of friendship to be, that I was not to speak against heretics for fear that my notice of them should be taken for an assault upon you? So long as I did not refuse to be belauded by you, you followed me as a master, you called me friend and brother, and acknowledged me as a catholic in every respect. But when I asked to be spared your praises, and judged myself unworthy to have such a great man for my trumpeter, you immediately ran your pen through what you had written, and began to abuse all that you had praised before, and to pour forth from the same mouth both sweet and bitter words. I wish you could understand what self-repression I am exerting in not suiting my words to the boiling heat of my breast; and how I pray, like the Psalmist:³⁰⁷² "Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth, keep the door of my lips. Incline not my heart to the words of malice;" and, as he says elsewhere:³⁰⁷³ "While the wicked stood before me I was dumb and was humbled and kept silence even from good words;" and again:³⁰⁷⁴ "I became as a man that heareth not and in whose mouth are no reproofs." But for me the Lord the Avenger will reply, as he says through the Prophet:³⁰⁷⁵ "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord": and in another place:³⁰⁷⁶ "Thou satest and spakest against thy brother, and hast slandered thy mother's son. These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest indeed by that I should be such an one as thyself; but I will reprove thee, and set them before thine eyes;" so that you may see yourself brought in guilty of those things which you falsely lay to another's charge.

32. I am told, to take another point, that one of his followers, Chrysogonus, finds fault with me for having said that in baptism all sins are put away,³⁰⁷⁷ and, in the case of the man who was twice married, that he had died and risen up a new man in Christ; and further that there were several such persons who were Bishops in the churches. I will make him a short answer. He and his friends have in their hands my letter, for which they take me to task. Let him give an answer to it, let him overthrow its reasoning by reasoning of his own, and prove my writings false by his writings. Why should he knit his brow and draw in and wrinkle up his nostrils, and weigh out his hollow words, and simulate among the common crowd a sanctity which his conduct belies? Let me proclaim my principles once more in his ears: That the old Adam dies completely in the laver of baptism, and a new man rises then with Christ; that the man that is earthly perishes and the man from heaven is raised up. I say this not because I myself have a special interest in this question, through the mercy of Christ; but that I made answer to my brethren when they asked me for my opinion, not intending to prescribe for others what they may think right to believe, nor to overturn their resolution by my opinion. For we who lie hid in our cells do not covet the Bishop's office. We are not like some, who, despising all humility, are eager to buy the episcopate with gold; nor do we wish, with the minds of rebels, to suppress the Pontiff chosen by God;³⁰⁷⁸ nor do we, by favouring heretics, show that we are heretics ourselves. As for money, we neither have it nor desire to have it.³⁰⁷⁹ "Having food and clothing, we are therewith content;" and meanwhile we constantly chant the words describing the man who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord:³⁰⁸⁰ "He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent; he who doeth these things shall not be moved eternally." We may add that he who does the opposite to these will fall eternally.

Almost every sentence in this last chapter is an insidious allusion to Rufinus. His "wrinkled-up brow" and "turned-up nose," his weighing out his words, his supposed wealth, are all alluded to in other places and especially in the satirical description of him given after his death in Jerome's letter (cxxv. c. 18) to Rusticus.