The Apology Summed Up: My Faith and My Reasons

However, let him act in these matters as he himself thinks lawful or useful. Let me sum up, at the end of this book, what I have said here and there in my own defense. He had said of me that it seemed I could not be a heretic without him. So I set out my belief, and with regard to the resurrection of the dead I proved that he rather than I was in error, since he spoke of the resurrection body as frail. I showed too that he did away with the difference of sex in the other world, saying that bodies would become souls, and women men. Next I made known the causes that had led me to translate, causes I think entirely proper. I showed that it was not because I was spurred on by love of contention, nor because I wanted glory, but because I was moved by the fear of God, that I brought in a store of old Greek material to be used in a new Latin building. I polished up old armor that had become covered with rust, not to stir up a civil war but to drive back an enemy attack. Then I brought forward the chief matter on which they have laid their forgers’ hands: the counterfeit blasphemy against the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. It is wholly foreign to me, but these men brought it in by their wickedness, as I showed by quotations. [a]