The Charge That Epiphanius Stole from Origen

How far will rashness not go, once the reins that check it are slackened? After telling us of the excommunication of Hilary, of the heretical book falsely bearing Cyprian’s name, and of the erasure and rewriting in Athanasius’s work done while I was asleep, he breaks out, as a last effort, into an attack on Pope Epiphanius. Epiphanius, in the letter he wrote to Bishop John, had called him a heretic, and the resentment this bred in his heart he pours out in his defense of Origen, consoling himself with these words: “The whole truth, which has been hidden, must be laid bare here. No one could judge so unjustly as to judge unequally where the cases are equal. But the fact is that those who egg on the slanderers of Origen are men who make a habit of either preaching at great length in the churches or writing books, and the whole of it, both books and preaching, is taken from Origen. So, to keep people from discovering their theft, which can be hidden only so long as they act ungratefully toward their master, they frighten all simple people away from reading him. “One of them, who thinks a necessity has been laid on him to speak evil of Origen among every nation and language, as though that were preaching the gospel, once declared in the hearing of a vast crowd of the brothers that he had read six thousand of his books. If he read them, as he usually declares, in order to know what harm there was in him, ten or twenty books, or at most thirty, would have been enough for that. “To read six thousand books is not the act of someone who wants to know the harm and the errors in him, but of someone who devotes almost his whole life to studies carried on under his teaching. How, then, can he claim a hearing when he blames those who, for the sake of instruction, have read a small part of his works, taking care to keep their own belief and their devotion whole?” [a]