The Apology Summed Up: His Own Commentaries

Then I took up, one by one, the points on which he had blamed Origen in order to strike at me and discredit my work of translation. From those very commentaries of his, from which he had said we might learn and test his belief, I showed that on three points he had himself written the same things he blames in Origen: namely, the earlier state of the soul, the restoration of all things, and his views about the devil and the fallen angels. I proved that he had said that men’s souls were held bound in this body as in a prison, and that he had asserted in these same commentaries that the whole rational creation, of angels and of human souls, formed one single body. Next I showed that, as for a society bound by perjury, no one had been so deeply initiated into its mysteries as he himself; and in keeping with this, I proved that he taught in these same commentaries that the truth and the higher teaching ought not to be made known to everyone. [a]

Next I took up the question of secular literature. On this he had made a declaration to Christ, as Christ sat on the judgment seat and ordered him to be beaten: “If ever I read or possess the books of the pagans, I have denied you.” And I showed clearly that he not only reads and possesses these books now, but rests all the boasting his teaching is full of on his knowledge of them; so much so that he boasts of having been introduced to logic through the Introduction of Porphyry, the prince of unbelievers. And while he says that to speak in this way or that about the soul and about other creatures is a doctrine of the pagans, I showed that he had spoken of God more degradingly than any of the pagans, when he said that God had a mother-in-law.

Further, he had declared that he had mentioned Origen only in two short prefaces, and then not as a man of apostolic rank but merely as a man of talent. But I, though for brevity’s sake I brought forward only ten of his prefaces, established that in each of them he had spoken of him not only as an apostolic man but as a teacher of the churches second only to the apostles, and as one whose teaching he himself and all wise men followed.