Eusebius and Didymus Take Origen as He Stands

These are his own words; he cannot deny them. Now I do not want to be put off with expressions like “since he said above.” I want the name of the book in which Origen first spoke rightly and then wrongly: in which he first says that the Holy Spirit and the Son are of the substance of God, and in what immediately follows declares that they are creatures. Do you not know that I have the whole of Origen’s works, and have read a great many of them?

Eusebius, a very learned man (notice that I say learned, not catholic; you must not, as you usually do, make this a ground for slandering me), fills six volumes with nothing else but the attempt to show that Origen shares his own belief, that is, the Arian faithlessness. He brings out many test passages and proves his point effectively. In what dream in an Alexandrian prison was it revealed to you that these passages, which he accepts as genuine, have been corrupted? But perhaps, being an Arian, he took up these additions of the heretics to support his own error, so that he would not be thought the only one who had held false opinions against the church. What answer, then, will you give about Didymus, who is certainly catholic in regard to the Trinity? You know that I translated his book on the Holy Spirit into Latin. He surely could not have agreed with passages that heretics had added to Origen’s works. Yet he wrote some short commentaries on On First Principles, the book you have translated. In them he never denies that what is written there was written by Origen. He only tries to persuade simple people like us that we do not understand Origen’s meaning, and how these passages ought to be taken in a good sense. So much for the Son and the Holy Spirit alone. As for the rest of Origen’s teachings, both Eusebius and Didymus hold to his views, and defend as spoken in a catholic and Christian sense what all the churches condemn. [b]