False Praise, Then Three Books Against Me

I have in my hands your letter, in which you tell me that I have been accused, and expect me to answer my accuser so that my silence will not be taken as admitting his charges. I admit that I sent the reply. But though I felt hurt, I kept the laws of friendship, and defended myself without accusing my accuser. I put it as if the objections that one friend had raised at Rome were being spread about by many enemies all over the world, so that everyone would think I was answering the charges, not the man. Will you tell me that I had another course open to me? That the law of friendship bound me to keep silent under accusation, and that, though I felt my face, so to speak, smeared with dirt and spattered with the filth of heresy, I was not even to wash it with plain water, for fear that an injustice might be laid at his door? No man ought to make such a demand, and no man ought to accept it. You openly attack your friend and set out charges against him under the mask of an admirer; and he is not even to be allowed to prove that he is a catholic, or to reply that the supposed heresy on which this eulogy is built comes not from agreeing with a heresy but from admiring a great genius. He thought it worthwhile to translate this book into Latin, or, as he prefers people to think, he was compelled to do it against his will. But what need was there to bring me into the question, when I was living in retirement, separated from him by vast stretches of land and sea? Why did he need to expose me to the ill will of the crowd, and do more harm to me by his praise than good to himself by holding me up as his example? And now, since I have rejected his praise, and by striking out what he wrote have shown that I am not what my friend declared me to be, I am told that he is in a fury and has written three books against me, full of graceful Attic wit. In them he attacks the very things he had praised before, and turns the ungodly teachings of Origen into a charge against me. Yet in that preface where he praised me so highly he says of me: “I will follow the rules of translation laid down by my predecessors, and especially those followed by the writer I have just mentioned. He has put into Latin more than seventy of Origen’s sermons, and also a few 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 corrected the language that a Latin reader can find no word in them that is at odds with our faith. In his steps, then, I propose to walk, if not with the same vigorous eloquence, at least keeping the same rules.” [a]