Book I.
The documents which Jerome had before him when he wrote his Apology were (1) Rufinus' Translation of Pamphilus' Apology with the Preface prefixed to it and the book on the Falsification of the Books of Origen, (2) the Translation of the Peri 'Archon and Rufinus' Preface, (3) The Apology of Rufinus addressed to Anastasius (see p. 430), and (4) Anastasius' letter to John of Jerusalem (p. 432 Apol. ii, 14, iii, 20). He had also other letters of Anastasius like that addressed to the Bishop of Milan (Jerome Letter 95. See also Apol. iii, 21). But he had not the full text of Rufinus' Apology (c. 4, 15). He received letters from Pammachius and Marcella, at the beginning of the Spring of 402, when the Apology written at Aquileia at the end of 400 had become known to Rufinus' friends for some time. They had been unable to obtain a full copy, but had sent the chief heads of it, and had strongly urged Jerome to reply. At the same time his brother Paulinianus who had been some three years in the West, returned to Palestine by way of Rome, and there heard and saw portions of Rufinus' Apology, which he committed to memory (Apol. i, 21, 28) and repeated at Bethlehem. To these documents Jerome replies.
The heads of the First Book are as follows.
1. It is hard that an old friend with whom I had been reconciled should attack me in a book secretly circulated among his disciples.
2. Others have translated Origen. Why does he single me out?
3. He gave me fictitious praise in his Preface to the Peri 'Archon. Now, since I defend myself, he writes 3 books against me as an enemy.
4, 5. He spoke of me as united in faith with him; but what is his faith? Why are his books kept secret? I can meet any attack.
6. I translated the Peri 'Archon because you demanded it, and because his translation slurred over Origen's heresies.
7. My translation put away ambiguities, and showed the real character of the book, and of the previous translation.
8. My translation of Origen's Commentaries created no excitement; his first translation, of Pamphilus' Apology, roused all Rome to indignation.
9. But the work was really Eusebius's, who tells us that Pamphilus wrote nothing.
10. After the condemnation of Origen by Theophilus and Anastasius, it would be wise in Rufinus to give up this pretended defence.
11. I had praised Eusebius as well as Origen only as writers; and was forced to condemn them as heretics. Why should this be taken amiss?
12. I wrote a friendly letter to Rufinus, which my friends kept back.
13. There is nothing to blame in my getting the help of a Jew in translating from the Hebrew.
14. There is nothing strange in my praising Origen before I knew the Peri 'Archon
15. The accusations seem inconsistent, but I knew them only by report.
16. The office of a commentator.
17. We must distinguish methods of writing, and not expect a vulgar simplicity in the various compositions of cultured men.
18. My assertion was true, that Origen permitted the use of falsehood.
19. The accusation about a mistranslation of Ps. ii is easily explained.
20. In the difficulties of the translator and the commentator we must get help where we can.
21. In the Commentary on Ephesians I acted straightforwardly in giving the views of Origen and others.
22. As to the passage "He hath chosen us before the foundation of the world."
23. As to the passage "Far above all rule and authority &c."
24. As to the passage "That in the ages to come &c."
25. As to "Paul the prisoner of Jesus Christ."
26. As to "The body fitly framed &c."
27. I quoted Origen's views as, "According to another heresy."
28, 29. As to "Men loving their wives as their own bodies."
30. To the charge of reading secular books I reply that I remember what I learned in youth.
31. Also, a promise given in a dream must not be pressed. Why should such things be raked up by old friends against one another?
32. I am right in my contention that all sins are remitted in baptism.
I have learned not only from your letter but from those of many others that cavils are raised against me in the school of Tyrannus, [3000] "by the tongue of my dogs from the enemies by himself" [3001] because I have translated the books Peri 'Archon into Latin. What unprecedented shamelessness is this! They accuse the physician for detecting the poison: and this in order to protect their vendor of drugs, not in obtaining the reward of innocence but in his partnership with the criminal; as if the number of the offenders diminished the crime, or as if the accusation depended on our personal feelings not on the facts. Pamphlets are written against me; they are forced on every one's attention; and yet they are not openly published, so that the hearts of the simple are disturbed, and no opportunity is given me of answering. This is a new way of injuring a man, to make accusations which you are afraid of sending abroad, to write what you are obliged to hide. If what he writes is true, why is he afraid of the public? if it is false, why has he written it? We read when we were boys the words of Cicero: "I consider it a lack of self-control to write anything which you intend to keep hidden." [3002] I ask, What is it of which they complain? Whence comes this heat, this madness of theirs? Is it because I have rejected a feigned laudation? [3003] Because I refused the praise offered in insincere words? Because under the name of a friend I detected the snares of an enemy? I am called in this Preface brother and colleague, yet my supposed crimes are set forth openly, and it is proclaimed that I have written in favour of Origen, and have by my praises exalted him to the skies. The writer says that he has done this with a good intention. How then does it come to pass that he now casts in my teeth, as an open enemy, what he then praised as a friend? He declared that he had meant to follow me as his predecessor in his translation, and to borrow an authority for his work from some poor works of mine. If that was so, it would have been sufficient for him to have stated once for all that I had written. Where was the necessity for him to repeat the same things, and to force them on men's notice by iteration, and to turn over the same words again and again, as if no one would believe in his praises? A praise which is simple and genuine does not show all this anxiety about its credit with the reader. How is it that he is afraid that, unless he produces my own words as witnesses, no one will believe him when he praises me? You see that we perfectly understand his arts; he has evidently been to the theatrical school, and has learned up by constant practice the part of the mocking encomiast. It is of no use to put on a veil of simplicity, when the schemer is detected in his malicious purpose. To have made a mistake once, or, to stretch the point, even twice, may be an unlucky chance; but how is it that he makes the supposed mistake with his eyes open, and repeats it, and weaves this mistake into the whole tissue of his writings so as to make it impossible for me to deny the things for which he praises me? A true friend who knew what he was about would, after our previous misunderstanding and our reconciliation, have avoided all appearance of suspicious conduct, and would have taken care not to do through inadvertence what might seem to be done advisedly. Tully says in his book of pleadings for Galinius: "I have always felt that it was a religious duty of the highest kind to preserve every friendship that I have formed; but most of all those in which kindness has been restored after some disagreement. In the case of friendships which have never been shaken, if some attention has not been paid, the excuse of forgetfulness, or at the worst of neglect is readily accepted; but after a return to friendship, if anything is done to cause offence, it is imputed not to neglect but to an unfriendly intention, it is no longer a question of thoughtlessness but of breach of faith." So Horace writes in his Epistle to Florus
[3004] "Kindness, ill-knit, cleaves not but flies apart."
[3000] Acts xix. 9. Rufinus's prænomen was Tyrannius.
[3001] Ps. lxviii. 23. Jerome's version is here, as in many cases unintelligible through a perverse literalism and an incorrect Hebrew text. In our Revised Version it stands: "That the tongue of thy dogs may have its portion from thine enemies."
[3002] Cic. Quæst. Acad. Lib. i.
[3003] That is, The Preface of Rufinus to his Translation of the Peri 'Archon (p. 427-8).
[3004] Hor. Ep. B. i, Ep. iii, 32.
2. What good does it do me that he declares on his oath that it was through simplicity that he went wrong? His praises are, as you know, cast in my teeth, and the laudation of this most simple friend (which however has not much either of simplicity or of sincerity in it) is imputed to me as a crime. If he was seeking a foundation of authority for what he was doing, and wishing to shew who had gone before him in this path he had at hand the Confessor Hilary, who translated the books of Origen upon Job and the Psalms consisting of forty thousand lines. He had Ambrose whose works are, almost all of them, full of what Origen has written; and the martyr Victorinus, who acts really with simplicity,' and without setting snares for others. As to all these he keeps silence; he does not notice those who are like pillars of the church; but me, who am but like a flea and a man of no account, he hunts out from corner to corner. Perhaps the same simplicity which made him unconscious that he was attacking his friend will make him swear that he knew nothing of these writers. But who will believe that he does not know these men whose memory is quite recent, even though they were Latins, being as he is such a very learned man, and one who has so great a knowledge of the old writers, especially the Greeks, that, in his zeal for foreign knowledge he has almost lost his own language? [3005] The truth is it is not so much that I have been praised by him as that those writers have not been attacked. But whether what he has written is praise (as he tries to make simpletons believe) or an attack, (as I feel it to be from the pain which his wounds give me), he has taken care that I should have none of my contemporaries to bring me honor by a partnership in praise, nor consolation by a partnership in vituperation.
[3005] See Ruf. Apol. i, 11. "I had grown dull in my Latinity through the disuse of nearly 30 years."
3. I have in my hands your letter, [3006] in which you tell me that I have been accused, and expect me to reply to my accuser lest silence should be taken as an acknowledgment of his charges. I confess that I sent the reply; but, though I felt hurt, I observed the laws of friendship, and defended myself without accusing my accuser. I put it as if the objections which one friend had raised at Rome were being bruited about by many enemies in all parts of the world, so that every one should think that I was replying to the charges, not to the man. Will you tell me that another course was open to me, that I was bound by the law of friendship to keep silence under accusation, and, though I felt my face, so to say, covered with dirt and bespattered with the filth of heresy, not even to wash it with simple water, for fear that an act of injustice might be imputed to him. This demand is not such as any man ought to make or such as any man ought to accept. You openly assail your friend, and set out charges against him under the mask of an admirer; and he is not even to be allowed to prove himself a catholic, or to reply that the supposed heresy on which this laudation is grounded arises not from any agreement with a heresy, but from admiration of a great genius. He thought it desirable to translate this book into Latin; or, as he prefers to have it thought he was compelled, though unwilling, to do it. But what need was there for him to bring me into the question, when I was in retirement, and separated from him by vast intervals of land and sea? Why need he expose me to the ill-will of the multitude, and do more harm to me by his praise than good to himself by putting me forward as his example? Now also, since I have repudiated his praise, and, by erasing what he had written, have shewn that I am not what my friend declared, I am told that he is in a fury, and has composed three books against me full of graceful Attic raillery, making those very things the object of attack which he had praised before, and turning into a ground of accusation against me the impious doctrines of Origen; although in that Preface in which he so lauded me, he says of me: "I shall follow the rules of translation laid down by my predecessors, and particularly those acted on by the writer whom I have just mentioned. He has rendered into Latin more than seventy of Origen's homiletical treatises, and a few also of his commentaries on the Apostle; and in these, wherever the Greek text presents a stumbling block, he has smoothed it down in his version and has so emended the language used that a Latin writer can find no word that is at variance with our faith. In his steps, therefore, I propose to walk, if not displaying the same vigorous eloquence, at least observing the same rules."