Praise That Was an Accusation

If it is true that you write to me to warn me, because you want me to be reformed, and do not want people to have a stumbling block put in their way, some driven mad and others silenced, why do you write books against me addressed to others, and scatter them through your henchmen for the whole world to read? And what becomes of the dilemma in which you try to trap me: “Whom, best of teachers, did you think you were correcting? If those you wrote to, there was nothing to find fault with in them; if me, whom you accuse, it was not to me that you wrote”? I will answer you in your own words: “Whom did you want to correct, unlearned teacher? Those who had done no wrong? Or me, to whom you did not write?” You think your readers are dull as cattle and all incapable of understanding your subtlety, or rather your ill will (for it was in this that the serpent was more subtle than all the beasts in paradise), when you ask that my warning to you should have been private, while you were pressing an indictment against me in public. You are not ashamed to call this indictment of yours an Apology. And you complain that I hold up a shield against your dagger; and with a great show of piety and holiness you put on the mask of humility and say, “If I had gone wrong, why did you write to others and not try to refute me?” I turn this very point back on you. What you complain that I did not do, why did you not do yourself? It is as if a man attacking another with kicks and fists, and finding him ready to fight back, should say to him, “Do you not know the command, ‘If someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other to him’?” It comes to this, my good sir: you are determined to beat me and put out my eye, and then, when I stir myself ever so little, you harp on the command of the gospel. [a]

Would you like to have all the windings of your cunning exposed, those tricks of the foxes who live among the ruins, of whom Ezekiel writes, “Like foxes in the desert, so are your prophets, O Israel”? Let me make you understand what you have done. You praised me in your preface in such a way that your praises became grounds for an accusation against me; and if I had not declared that I had no connection with my admirer, I would have been judged a heretic. I pushed back your charges, that is, your praises. Without showing ill will to you personally, I answered the accusations, not the accuser, and I spoke out against the heretics, to show that I was a catholic, though you had defamed me. Then you grew angry and raged, and wrote the most magnificent works against me. And when you had given them to everyone to read and repeat, letters came to me from Italy and Rome and Dalmatia, each showing more clearly than the last what all those compliments were worth with which you had decorated me in your earlier praise.