The Diligent Reader

A third passage he finds fault with is the one in which I gave a threefold interpretation of the apostle’s words: “That in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” The first was my own opinion; the second, the opposing opinion held by Origen; the third, the simple explanation given by Apollinaris. As for my not giving their names, I must ask to be pardoned on the ground that I did it out of modesty. I did not wish to belittle men whom I was partly following and whose opinions I was translating into Latin. But, I said, the diligent reader will at once look into these things and form his own opinion. And at the end I repeated: “Another turns to a different sense the words, ‘That in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace.’” [a]

“Ah,” you will say, “I see that under the name of the diligent reader you have set out the opinions of Origen.” I confess I was wrong. I ought to have said not “the diligent reader” but “the blasphemous reader.” If I had foreseen that you would take measures of this kind, I might have done so, and so avoided your slanderous speeches. It is, I suppose, a great crime to have called Origen a diligent reader, especially when I had translated seventy of his books and praised him to the skies. For that I had to defend myself in a short treatise two years ago, in answer to your trumpeting of my praises. In those “praises” you gave me, you charged me with having called Origen a teacher of the churches; and now that you speak as an enemy, you think I will be afraid because you accuse me of calling him a diligent reader. Why, we call shopkeepers diligent when they are particularly thrifty, and slaves when they are not wasteful, and the attendants who made our childhood a burden to us, and even thieves when they are particularly clever. So too the conduct of the dishonest steward in the Gospel is called wise. Moreover, “The children of this world are wiser than the children of light,” and “The serpent was wiser than all the beasts the Lord had made on the earth.”