Charges I Know Only by Report

This abandonment of friendship gives me no reason to trust him, and open hostility brings with it the suspicion of falsehood. Still, I will be bold enough to go out to meet him and ask what heretical doctrine I have stated. Then either I may, like him, express my regret and swear that I never knew Origen’s bad doctrines, and that his unfaithfulness has now been made known to me for the first time by Pope Theophilus; or else I may at least prove that my opinions were sound, and that he, as is his habit, did not understand them. It is impossible that in my commentaries on Ephesians, which I hear he makes the ground of his accusation, I should have spoken both rightly and wrongly; that both sweet water and bitter should have flowed from the same spring; and that, after condemning all through the work those who believe that souls were created out of angels, I should suddenly have forgotten myself and defended the opinion I had condemned before. [a]

He can hardly charge me with foolishness, since he has proclaimed me in his writings to be a man of the highest culture and eloquence. Otherwise, the sort of silly wordiness he attributes to me would seem to belong to a petty, quibbling lawyer and a babbler rather than to an eloquent man. What the point of his written accusations is, I do not know, for only reports of them have reached me, not the writings themselves; and, as the apostle tells us, it is a foolish thing to beat the air. Still, I must answer in uncertainty until certainty reaches me. And I will begin by teaching my rival, in my old age, a lesson I learned in my youth: that there are many kinds of speech, and that, according to the subject matter, not only the sentences but also the very words of writings vary.