Why I Translated On First Principles

His followers object to me (and,

that I have translated into Latin Origen’s books On First Principles, which are harmful and opposed to the faith of the church. My answer to them is short and simple. Your letters, my brother Pammachius, and those of your friends, compelled me. You declared that these books had been falsely translated by another man, and that a good many things had been inserted, or added, or altered. And so that your letters would not fail to convince, you sent a copy of this translation, together with the preface in which I was praised. As soon as I had run my eye over these documents, I noticed at once that the ungodly teaching Origen sets out about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which Roman ears could not bear to hear, had been changed by the translator to give a more orthodox meaning. As for his other teachings, I found that the translator had either put them just as they stood in the Greek, or had stated them more strongly and in exaggerated form, in words taken from the books of Didymus, the most open champion of Origen. These were his teachings on the fall of the angels; on the falling away of human souls; his evasions about the resurrection; his ideas about the world, or rather about Epicurus’s spaces between the worlds; on the restoration of all things to a state of equality; and others much worse than these, which would take too long to list. The effect of all this is that the reader, finding that the book stated the catholic teaching on the Trinity, would take in these heretical views without being warned. [b]