The Apology Summed Up: His Attacks on Others

Moreover, I pointed out clearly that it is his habit to disparage all good men, and that if he can find something to blame in one after another of those who are highly esteemed and have made a name in literature, he thinks he has added to his own reputation. I showed too how shamefully he has attacked some of Christ’s priests. He has spared neither the monks nor the virgins, nor those who live in continence, whom he had praised before. In his lampoons he has defamed every order and rank of Christians. He attacked shamefully and foully even Ambrose, that saintly man, the memory of whose illustrious life still lives in the hearts of all. Even Didymus, whom he had once ranked among the seer-prophets and the apostles, he now places among those whose teaching departs from that of the churches. He brands every single writer, ancient and modern, with the marks of ignorance or of folly; and in the end he does not spare even the martyrs. [a]

All these things I have proved from his own works and his own testimony, not from outside witnesses. I have gone through each particular and brought out the evidence from those very books of his that he most commends. These are the only books he excepted as containing nothing he needed to repent of, while he says he repents of all his other sayings and writings. Not that his repentance is sincere; but he is driven into such a corner that he must choose either to pretend repentance or to give up the vantage point that lets him bite and wound anyone he pleases. So I chose not to touch his other writings, so that his conviction might come from those alone on which he had himself shut the door of repentance. Last of all, I have shown that he has altered the sacred books that the apostles committed to the churches as the trustworthy deposit of the Holy Spirit; and that he who cries out about the daring of translating mere human works himself commits the greater crime of overturning the divine oracles.