Others Translated Origen, So Why Single Me Out

What good does it do me that he declares on oath that it was out of simplicity that he went wrong? His praises, as you know, are thrown in my face, and the eulogy of this most simple friend, which, by the way, has not much simplicity or sincerity in it, is charged against me as a crime. If he was looking for some authority to rest his work on, and wanted to show who had gone before him on this path, he had the Confessor Hilary close at hand, who translated Origen’s books on Job and the Psalms, amounting to forty thousand lines. He had Ambrose, whose works are almost all full of what Origen wrote. And he had the martyr Victorinus, who really does act with “simplicity” and without setting traps for others. About all these he keeps silent. He takes no notice of those who are like pillars of the church; but me, who am no more than a flea and a man of no account, he hunts out from one corner to the next. Perhaps the same simplicity that kept him from realizing 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? He is such a very learned man, with so great a knowledge of the old writers, especially the Greeks, that in his zeal for foreign learning he has almost lost his own language! 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 wrote is praise, as he tries to make simple people believe, or an attack, as I feel it to be from the pain his wounds give me, he has made sure that I have none of my contemporaries beside me: neither to honor me by sharing the praise, nor to console me by sharing the abuse. [a]